American artist, Jeff Cowen (b. 1966) uses only analogue photography. All the prints are made in his darkroom. His chief concern is to plumb and expand the limits of the medium from a present-day perspective.

The photographs themselves represent only the starting point of an artistic process. Using chemicals and other additives, Cowen works freely on the photographic paper, in order thus to appropriate the material in a painterly fashion.

Other works are created totally without a negative. He is primarily concerned less with the photographic image, the individual motif – be it landscape, portrait, still life or sculpture – than with the material, chemical pre-conditions of the photographic process.

He is interested in the question of how the sensory experience of three-dimensional plasticity can be reproduced in the two-dimensionality of the photographic print.

Cowan initially worked as assistant to the American photographers Larry Clark and Ralph Gibson, a time he used to familiarise himself with darkroom techniques. He studied drawing and anatomy at the Arts Students League of New York and the New York School.

Published on the occasion of the exhibition at Ludwig Museum, Koblenz (30 October 2016 – 22 January 2017), and at Huis Marseille Museum for Photography, Amsterdam (11 March – 4 June 2017).