Eileen Cowin

Eileen Cowin
Nationality	American
Education	State University of New York New Paltz; IIT Institute of Design
Known for	Photography, Video, Performance
Website	http://eileencowin.com

Eileen Cowin (born 1947) is an American photographer and video artist known for employing the tools of mass media (billboards, film stills, pictorials, photo-text, advertising) to produce images that provoke reflection, while conveying ideas. Driven by an interest in the nature of storytelling, narrative and the relationship between fiction and non-fiction, her imagery tends to explore chance, fate, memory and experience.

With a skillful use of gesture and pose, Cowin is known for staging mysterious, theatrical scenarios for the camera. Finding inspiration in European painting, her photographs blend fifteenth century Christian iconography, nineteenth century romantic visions and twentieth century surrealist juxtapositions. Her range of imagery stretches from poses found in paintings by Jan Van Eyck, Ingres and Goya to film noir and television. Untitled (Magritte) reveals Cowin’s penchant for suspense and recurring themes of privacy, victimization and voyeurism.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, she earned a BS (1968) from State University of New York at New Paltz, and an MS in Photography (1970) from the IIT Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, where she studied with Aaron Siskind and Arthur Siegel. While still in graduate school, Cowin showed her work to Gary Metz (MoMA's then curatorial intern) and Peter C. Burnell (MoMA's then Photography Curator). Consequently, MoMA acquired two images from her series of photographic transparency and magazine transfer overlays. Their recommending her work to Lee Witkin led to her being represented by his gallery, where she had one of her first solo exhibitions and co-organized one of the first comprehensive exhibitions of Lewis Hine's WPA-era photographs from the Bureau of Child Labor. She later worked in a photo stock agency for a brief time.

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