Jeff Cowen – A Step Out of Reality
Published in B+W Magazine 2025 - words by Sean Patrick Hill
Jeff Cowen’s darkroom practice moves far beyond traditional photography, merging the tactile qualities of painting and drawing with analogue printing methods. His monumental silver gelatin prints, recently shown at Fotografiska Stockholm, are physically worked through toning, scratching, tearing, and layering, each becoming a singular object with sculptural presence.
What first appears to be a photograph soon reveals itself as something else: a space of emotion, memory, and abstraction. Cowen’s works carry the raw immediacy of gesture while remaining deeply meditative, offering not a record of the outside world but a visual mapping of an interior one. The body, landscape, and light are recurring motifs, but they resist clear identification, instead inviting the viewer into a space between presence and absence.
Cowen draws influence from both Eastern philosophy and Western art history, building a language that is deeply personal and, at times, spiritual. His images, while rooted in analogue technique, feel timeless, a part relic, part revelation. Through his hands-on process, he redefines what photography can be: not simply a captured moment but a process of transformation.