In our digital age, questioning the reliability of a picture is commonplace. Photography has lost its position as an arbiter of facts. Artists, meanwhile, take advantage of that slippage to explore concepts of truth and falsehood.
This is a forceful consideration in the art of Eileen Cowin, whose survey Between Panic and Paradise, of 50 prints and a few videos, is on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) through January 3.
Cowin is a pioneer in the ways photography came to be used by contemporary artists in the 1970s. Rather than documentation, they chose invention. All photographs are a form of fiction. Hers are explicitly so.
Many of her overtly staged photographs, whether in color or black and white, draw from a cinematic sensibility. To underscore this idea, the galleries of her show are painted in noirish tones, rather than the customary white. It is like walking into a darkened theater. Her photographs are often produced in a sequence to suggest a story, at times with the artist herself a figure in the drama.
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The entrance gallery, dedicated to “The Unforeseeable Future,” displays pieces addressing the passing of time. In a recent piece presented on a large monitor, the artist, who just turned 79, is talking about mortality while looking at a greeting card that states, with purported irony, “Happy Birthday, another year closer to death.” That tone of dark humor, hard facts, Thanatos, and eros pervades the exhibition.
That first gallery also includes her stunning 2025 series, The Uninvited Visitor. Cowin photographed herself wearing an oversize scarlet bathrobe, her face buried in a white cloth held in both hands; in a second print, her back is to the camera and her considerable mass of curly dark hair is blowing straight upward. A third print is black-and-white, capturing a man holding his face in his hand as though grieving. A fourth shows a man and woman embracing in a darkened cinder block room. All are lit in the cool, stark manner of the Dutch old masters. The uninvited visitor is, of course, death.
Even in her color photographs, black triumphs. There are no sunny seascapes, despite the artist’s having lived in Los Angeles for many years. Three giant unframed works, suspended vertically, show only the spines of books with significant titles, Killing Time, Waiting, and Lost in America.
The show unfolds in a series of works spanning half a century, but their look is fresh and timeless. The museum’s photography curators, Rebecca Morse and Britt Salvesen, were careful not to crowd a show that ranges from Polaroids from the 1970s to elaborate multipanel compositions from the 2010s.
The artist loves a double entendre. In the exhibition catalog, Salvesen writes, “Eyes and hands may speak without words, but language itself is central to Cowin’s aesthetic.” In 1977, Cowin used pairs of small color photos to illustrate two definitions of a single word. For instance, Shot refers to a snapshot, yes, but also depicts a person being shot with a gun.
Cowin’s work evolved in the 1970s, when the long struggle for photography to be accepted as art dovetailed with the evolution of conceptual art, which rejected the tradition of painting. As Morse explains, “Cowin paved the way for experimental narrative photography.”
At the same time, women were coming to terms with identity during the feminist movement and embracing photography as a useful tool of representation. Cowin’s art is emblematic of that moment.
She matured at a time when Southern California artists were gaining attention for their fabricated photographs, as opposed to those termed “straight,” or unmanipulated images taken with a camera. And why not? It’s Hollywood. Cowin used such techniques in ways similar to artists such as Cindy Sherman and other figures in the Pictures Generation in New York. All were leading a movement to be considered as artists using photographic methods, not as photographers.
Cowin, a Brooklyn native, studied art, specifically printmaking, at the State University of New York, New Paltz. During graduate studies at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology, she dedicated herself to photography. After graduation in 1970, she worked at Witkin, a photography gallery in New York, and then at Franconia College, where she set up the photography department.
She moved to Los Angeles in the early ’70s when she was hired by California State University Fullerton. Using the newly popular 4x5 large-format camera with a Polaroid back, allowing high-quality photographs developed instantaneously, she made the provocative series One Night Stand (1977–1978). In one still life, composed atop a nightstand, a telephone and a lamp are joined by a suggestive print of a man dropping his trousers. More double entendres.
Her subsequent series, Family Docudrama (1980–1984), consists of stylized and staged photographs of her then–new husband, Jay Brecker, with his two teenage children from a previous marriage. Cowin first met Brecker at a party where they both had followed directions to dress in a single color, yellow for him, red for her. They married in 1980.
There is a voyeuristic quality to watching their marriage evolve alongside adolescents watching TV or finishing their homework. The fictional and factual coalesce to make the art. Later in the exhibition, long texts describe Cowin’s and Brecker’s very different first impressions. But isn’t everyone’s story some kind of fiction? Cowin’s photographs lean in to such speculation.
Cowin had a secret weapon that allowed her the freedom to construct her dramatic fictions: her identical twin sister, Robbi Johnstone. Johnstone was used to represent the artist in the action. Cowin is operating at a remove, as though she has been looking at a self that isn’t quite her. Both Johnstone and Brecker saw themselves in these pictures while attending the LACMA preview.
Parallel to Cowin’s photography is her work in video. Fear Itself (2014) consists of monitors presenting individual faces, not recognizable figures, reacting to fear. No words, just music composed to reflect the same emotion. Viewers may add their own story.
She extended the aesthetic of cinematic editing to the still photographs arranged in long horizontal strips. Now You Know (2019) has an aura of melancholy: white shirts on hangers, a gray block wall building, desolate landscapes, a man wearing a gas mask. The piece seems to ask, What do we know about our passing lives, the larger histories, or the future?
In this or other work, Cowin never provides the easy answer. Her exhibition confirms what she has said of herself: “I’m not an in-your-face artist. I’m an under-the-skin artist.”•
Hunter Drohojowska-Philp, the author of Rebels in Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene and the 1960s and Full Bloom: The Art and Life of Georgia O’Keeffe, has written numerous books and articles on modern and contemporary art with an emphasis on California and the West. They can be found at hunterdrohojowska-philp.com.
