Detail of Edith, Danville (Virginia), 1963 by Emmet Gowin Photograph: Emmet Gowin  The Azca gallery is tucked at the back of a shopping mall opposite Real Madrid's towering Bernabeu Stadium. It's the unlikely setting for one of the most interesting shows in this year's PhotoEspaña festival: the first European retrospective of the American photographer Emmet Gowin. The show includes his later landscapes, the most dramatic of which capture the volcano Mount St Helens in Washington, US, just after it erupted in 1980. But it is his images of home and family that remain his most evocative.  Born in 1941, Gowin's black-and-white pictures of his wife and children on their farm in rural Virginia have a hauntingly beautiful quality that comes from their utter simplicity. It's difficult to describe their subtle power without making them sound everyday; Gowin had an unerring ability to render the commonplace luminous and mysterious. His camera captures the ebb and flow of family life. His children pose in Halloween masks or covered in swathes of cloth, or are caught simply stretching or relaxing. They seem utterly at ease with his camera, as does his wife, Edith, the defining presence in Gowin's work.  He was enthralled by Edith from their first meeting. He once described his portraits of her as "agreements" they made with each other – and the whole first part of the show can be read as an extended expression of his love for her. "My attention," he said of the hundreds of photographs he took of her throughout their long marriage, "was a natural duty that could honour that love."  His gaze never objectifies her, even when he is photographing her nude. There is too much tenderness – and attentiveness – for that, particularly in portraits as she grows older, her fine-featured face slowly registering lines and creases. One early, outdoor portrait is of the back of her head, her hair parted above her long neck. Here, in the fine detail of skin and fabric, you can sense his love for her, and how it finds its own singular expression in his art.  Gowin studied under the great Harry Callahan at the Rhode Island School of Design, another photographer who made his wife his enduring subject. Callahan's work is paired with that of Edward Weston in an exhibition at PhotoEspaña entitled He, She, It.  It is a study in contrasts, with Weston's formal approach turning every nude female into a study of light, shade and shape, while Callahan's images of his wife, Eleanor seem more intimate and less rigorously posed. I can't have been the only visitor who wished Callahan had been paired with Gowin rather than Weston who, for all his genius, often seemed to see the female body as simply another sculptural form. There is much to admire in his nudes, but I find them hard to love. Nevertheless, it's an intriguing compare-and-contrast show that, if you happen to be in Madrid in the coming weeks, should not be missed. And, if possible, make the trip out to the shopping mall by the Bernabeu to take in the work of the lesser known Gowin, whose images become more quietly powerful with each passing year.
Sean O'Hagan: Some of the greatest photos ever taken were by men whose muses were their own wives, as breathtaking shows at PhotoEspaña 2013 prove