Jeff Cowen on seeing, making, and forty years in the darkroom
There are artists who are easy to explain, and there are artists who make you question whether explanation is even the right ambition.
Jeff Cowen belongs firmly in the second category — and has done for the better part of four decades.
His practice is built on handmade, one-of-a-kind analogue silver-gelatin photographs, developed through a darkroom process that incorporates painting and collage. Each work is the result of accumulated knowledge, intuition, and a refusal to separate the chemical from the conceptual. It is photography in the most physical sense — and simultaneously something that exceeds the medium's usual boundaries.
WILLAS contemporary has worked with Jeff since 2014, presenting his work across solo shows in Oslo and Stockholm, and at major art fairs including Paris Photo, Photo London, and Photo Basel. Most recently, his Provence Works series — awarded a Pollock-Krasner Grant — was exhibited at the Huis Marseille Museum for Photography in Amsterdam, in special collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, where his images were shown alongside Van Gogh's own paintings and drawings. A monograph published by Walther König accompanied the exhibitions. In 2024, Berlin Works, curated by Ellen K Willas, opened at Fotografiska Stockholm. In 2025, Jeff returned to Paris Photo with a solo booth at the Grand Palais.
The podcast Right Eye Dominant offers something genuinely rare: an extended conversation with Cowen himself. He speaks about his formative years as an assistant to Larry Clark and Ralph Gibson, the development of his darkroom practice, the making of Provence Works, and — perhaps most revealingly — about what it means to see. Dominant in the right eye, he explains, which turns out to matter more than it might sound.
For anyone wanting to understand what drives one of the most singular voices in contemporary photography, this is the place to start.