Explorations into Materiality – On the Work of Jeff Cowen
Encounters with printed photographs are typically with a kind of ‘fixed quantity’; a flat and uniform image printed on one of a variety of substrates. The expectation is that this substrate will play a passive role in the generation of meaning. It inevitably however contributes to the reading of the work, be it as a familiar glossy snapshot, a billboard, a fine inkjet print or some kind of silver gelatin paper.
There is a rich vein within photographic history of explorations into materiality, American artist Liz Deschenes’ unfixed photograms immediately coming to mind as an example. Their silvered and mirror-like surfaces morph through reflection as the viewer’s spatial relationship to them changes. This movement of the body is encouraged by their forms that often bracket and frame the gallery architecture, turning the relationship between body and photograph into a spatially defined one. They are unmoored from the photograph’s traditional fixity, their surfaces continuing to react to light and atmospheric changes over time.
My general point is that what you see from one perspective on a photographic surface is not necessarily the experiential total. This perceptual link connects Deschenes’ rigorous questioning of the medium to the more expressive work of American photographic artist Jeff Cowen, whose work was the subject of a solo show at London gallery Cassius & Co during 2024. It is quickly evident with Cowen’s work that despite being image oriented and semi-representational (with important exceptions in the show), the relation of the viewer’s body to the print subtly reshapes what we see. Where one stands and the angle of view this creates, will change one’s perception of the work. Chemically, his prints are fixed, perceptually they are malleable; not in the flip-flop way of a lenticular print, but more akin to oil sitting atop water. They play with and heighten the active relationship between light source, viewpoint and surface, bringing a metallic and chemical life to their embedded images.
It is quickly evident with Cowen’s work that despite being image oriented and semi-representational … the relation of the viewer’s body to the print subtly reshapes what we see.
Though monochrome prints they flush with colour, whilst the symbolic components of the image shift in legibility; it is hard to pin down a true version of each work, a final view. As you move around the room, multiple variations of each picture are revealed. The same image can be seen one moment with relative clarity, another as a coloured abstraction. They are images that have in many cases been pushed towards the edge of legibility; through focus of the camera or enlarger, damage to the lens surface etc. We see unclear images in unfixed conditions: Cowen’s photography is very much of the world, but freed from the decisiveness and closeness to reality that the medium is typically expected to present. These feel like half-remembered images, caught on surfaces that bring to attention the alchemical and metallurgic nature of most of photographic history. Their shifts in colour and visibility recall the earliest daguerrotypes, with a scale however that relates them both to the viewer’s body and to that of painting.
Cowen’s works trade largely on a mutability of context, with specifics of time and place totally obscured. Photographed by him or produced via found negatives, the iconography of his subject matter feels dislocated from the contemporary moment. Some are ethereal, faint and blurred as if seen through a mirage. Perhaps this is the point; as photographs, they make no attempt to disguise the distance they represent between the viewer and reality of which they are a trace. True colours, abundant detail and defined sharpness are absent; they instead straddle a line between representing both the medium’s constituent parts (paper, light sensitive emulsion, chemistry) and outside world. These elements coalesce to form images that feel to be about the act of scrying ones memory for something that remains hovering on the edge of presence. Oliver Bak’s paintings sat in place of Cowens prints in Cassius & Co last year, and this atmospheric unclarity is a clear line between them, if an unknowing shared concern, explored through the imagined image of painting and the semi-reality of the photograph.
Cowen’s works trade largely on a mutability of context, with specifics of time and place totally obscured.
Heightening these perceptual shifts is their presentation; each print is pinned to its backboard, unflattened within deep frames that are more like vitrines. These are not photographs that should be flattened, their objecthood silenced in service of the image. They are objects whose language and emotive capacity is as bound up in this curling, reflective material and its processual traces as the image itself. Their presentation as fragile paper artefacts subtly shifts our understanding of them from the reproducible to singular, drawing attention to the layers of painterly and processual activity that comprise the image/object we see. With their minimal content, they read as something half-remembered, barely held onto, very much on the edge of memory with chemical attempts to bind it to reality only half successful.
Cowen’s prints could easily be dubbed painterly; but where that rubicon is crossed is less clear when considered. The 1:1 scale brush strokes in a large abstract work Untitled XLII, (2018) interact with marks and forms that feel dramatically enlarged. The projected drawings that formed the base of Franz Klein’s paintings embraced this same tension. In other works such as ORP 3 (2018), these brush marks are absent, replaced by marks of chemical interactions that make visible photography’s liquidity. This play with a loss of material control echoes the work of numerous painters from Helen Frankenthaler and Morris Lewis to Frank Bowling; embracing the inherent uncontrollability of painting with chemistry in near darkness.
Whilst recalling the painterly surfaces, this making visible of the chemical interactions of development is entirely photographic. Its presence brings to our attention just how much of the photographic process is typically hidden for us to be able to engage as directly as possible with the subject of the photograph. When processed properly these marks are absent, the image is not disrupted. By making the process so visible through experimental applications of chemistry and the gold toning of prints, Cowen forces us to see the inherent subjectivity and filtration of reality that any photograph comprises.
Another significant strand to this exhibition centered on the pairing of Cowen’s work with an integrated exhibition of rare Surrealist books. The link to the unconscious mind is perhaps by now evident, but what this pairing sought to draw out more specifically is the relevance of automatic drawing and writing to Cowen’s work. A detailed exploration of that link is beyond this text’s scope, but given the way that calligraphic forms appear drawn in photographic chemistry across a number of prints, the integration of an unconscious and codified language further complicates the idea of photographic representation. Instead it seems to visually point to the images that exist within our subconscious – unknown with regard to their meaning, shaping us without clear-cut symbolic values. A thought that has linguistic form, de-natures into expressive lines.
And so whilst process is at the core of Cowen’s photographs, arguably they are no more process-driven than any other image. Here, however, the normal technical procedures have been upended so as to embrace experimentation and the unique potential of analogue materials, creating prints that are substantially emotive, atmospheric and illusive. They confront us with a photography free of the burden of description and (clear-cut) communication; a photography that actively withholds what we expect it to provide. What is significant is that the whole object is engaged to achieve this, achieving a satisfying destabilisation of our perception.
Jeff Cowen’s ‘Asemia’ was exhibited at Cassius & Co from 7th November 2024 – 11th January 2025.
Jeff Cowen
Cassius & Co
