Collection
Highlight EILEEN COWIN’S Based on a True Story
Los Angeles
County Museum of Art Members Magazine
by Tim B. Wride, Assistant Curator of Photography
As a culture we have been conditioned to blindly accept as truth the
adages “every picture tells a story” and “one
picture is worth more than a
thousand words,” statements implying that there is a narrative
to be derived from
any image. At the same time, we still widely accept that photographs are
inherently truthful, even while their veracity is being assaulted through a
greater
public understanding of the potentials of digital imaging and photographic
manipulation. Pairing these two seemingly opposing beliefs—photographs
as a
source of fiction and photographs as a source of truth—has
provided fertile ground
for exploring the manner in which photography can be used in the creation
of narratives.
Santa Monica-based artist Eileen Cowin continues the wide-ranging
traditions of narrative photography that stretch from the 19th-century moralizing
montages of Henry Peach Robinson or Oscar G. Rejlander, to the reportage of
Lewis
Hine and the photo-essays of W. Eugene Smith and Danny Lyon, to the fictive
constructions of Duane Michals. Cowin’s work is differentiated
from her
predecessors, however, by its distinctive contemporary psychological and cinematic
sensibility, which relates it more closely to the work of Victor Burgin or
Cindy
Sherman.
Cowin has been working with narrative strategies for the better part
of
the last two decades. In work such as Based on a True Story, she exploits the
viewer’s propensity to “read” images.
Cowin’s six panels contain the barest
of associative elements: an extended finger tracing the lips of a stone
sculpture; a lone figure, shirt drenched, seated on an unmade bed; a face buried
in a handkerchief; cupped hands with water leaking from them; a wrapped
package; a male figure in bed. Her format recalls that of storyboards, animation
cels, or comic strips—images that progress from one to another
to form a
narrative. Through this familiar format, she coerces the viewer to spend the
associative capital necessary to arrive at meaning. Even in her selection of
a title,
Cowin challenges her audience to decipher the story behind the images, to add
up all the elements and form the prescribed narrative—but
whose narrative,
the artist’s or the viewer’s?
In Based on a True Story, Cowin completely gives herself and the
components of her “true story” over
to a sense of mood. She has pared down her
visuals to a sparse yet richly evocative elegance. The pictographic elements
of the
piece are encapsulated within film noir cartouches, where they function as
graphic signposts to the implied “story.” They
are almost calligraphic in
their emotional intensity, which is heightened by their appearance within a
blackness that bespeaks a place within memory or the unconscious. These enigmatic
yet accessible images almost float to the surface of a tactile darkness in
what
seems a mocking reference to the fortune-telling magic eight ball popular
with children a decade or two ago. And like the eight ball’s
overly general and
universally applicable answers, the images of Cowin’s piece
require that the
viewers contribute as much as they receive, interpreting the images according
to
their individual emotional and psychological states. |
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