 Gowin retired from teaching at Princeton University at the end of 2009 and lives in Pennsylvania with his wife Edith.Gowin has acknowledged that the photographs of Eugene Atget, Bill Brandt, Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Alfred Stieglitz, and especially Harry Callahan and Frederick Sommer have influenced him.Most of his early family pictures were taken with a 4 X 5 camera on a tripod, a situation in which he said "both the sitter and photographer look at each other, and what they both see and feel is part of the picture."