Adger W. Cowans: Running Deep with Photography

Moments for Billie, 1965. Court esy t he artist. 136* N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art ADGER W. COWANS Running D e e p w ith Photography Dowoti Desir I n the twenty-first century, perceiving photoI graphy as art is a construct taken for granted, I but from the late nineteenth century through the better part of the mid twentieth century, though well established as a craft, photography as an art form was still a revolutionary idea. By the 1960s an America whose imperialist and narrowly empiricist narrative needed to shift to include the voice and vision of cultural and intellectual change burning down its doors. Social, political, creative, and personal revolution was inescapable. The radicalism of the times had artistic photographer Adger Cowans move the medium from its comfortable post dictating descriptive accuracy and visual journalism, to an abstract expressionism instantiated in the discourse of modernity that both paralleled and expanded the debates African American artists were hosting among themselves and jostling with the mainstream art world. Running Deep, while not exclusively an abstract photography exhibition, presents a range of works: black and white and color, analog and digN k a - 1 3 7 ital, from 1960 to 2006, whose theme is the very special relationship Adger Cowans shares with water and the camera. It is also a personal and highly spiritual exhibition that allows the artist to express his humanity by revealing his vulnerability , humility, and awe in the moments of solitude he shares with the elixir of life. Artist and photographer Adger W. Cowans was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936. He studied photography under Clarence H. White, Jr., at Ohio University, where he received a BFA in photography in 1958. Cowans served as a military photographer in the U.S. Navy before moving to New York, where he worked with Life magazine photographer Gordon Parks and fashion photographer Henri Clarke. He furthered his photographic education at the School of Motion Picture Arts in New York (1961) and continued on at the School of Visual Arts, in film editing in 1965. The recipient of the John Hay Whitney Fellowship, Cowans also received the award for best photograph at the Yolo International Exhibition judged by Ansel Adams and Jack Welpott. In 2001, he won the Black Umbrellas, 1960. Court esy t h e artist. Florence Biennale of Contemporary Art Award II Lorenzo II Magnifico Alia Camera. Having traveled the world and lived a life as an actor and musician, Cowans has always been a gifted plastic artist working with the likes of late Bob Blackburn as a printmaker, and, of course, painting. A member of the black revolutionary artists group, AFRICOBRA, he continues to paint and exhibit his work regularly. But it is his work as a photographer that makes Cowans like no other. The focus on abstraction highlights the unique and singular contributions Cowans has made as a photographer. While his impact in the black art world at large is still underappreciated and possibly misunderstood, this body of work both artistically and metaphysically transcends the racial divides of the mid- to late-twentieth-century contemporary art world. Cowans's work augmented the vocabulary of modern photography, at once forcing and buttressing the medium's complex relationship to abstract art. Photography instructs us ... not despite its problematic relation to actuality but precisely because of it. And somewhere in the combination of its externalizations of the process of seeing and the ever-present tension between the stated and the implied lies photography's unique, privileged relations to the abstract. A. D. Coleman. Adger Cowans was at the forefront of kneading the problematics of this relationship with images both nuanced and highly sensuous. Descartes noted the fault of judgment and not of perception betrays the excess of infinite will over infinite understanding. Cowans beckons the viewer to move beyond perception, beyond will (vouloir) and beyond sight {voir). Each photo is a proscenium that stages voluntary succession to the anagogical —bringing what is at the periphery of our consciousness and sight to the center. Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was among the 138* N k a Journal of Contemporary African Art first to rendre la vue (respectively, "give sight...