The emancipatory potential of photography: Eileen Cowin and Jonesy at California Museum of Photography reviewed

A cowboy walks up an otherwise empty, nondescript suburban alley in the light of dawn. He pauses mid-step, to look back at a woman who stands so deep in the foreground that she has nearly disappeared from the frame. Their sense of longing and impending separation is palpable. It is as if they are seeing and being seen by the other for the last time. 

We have been here before, in dozens of movies stretching back through the history of film.

Is she a mother, a sister, a friend, a lover? Is he the man who got away? The child or brother leaving home for the last time? A new or long-lost friend? We would have had to watch the scene that came before to know. But the upshot is the same. These two figures in the titular image, Telling Them Apart (2023) recently exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, are parting ways. 

I choose the term “figure” consciously, as it relates to the formulaic structure of the photograph. Its exaggerated three-point perspective draws our gaze to the deep red shirt at the apex of the image.  Everything about the narrative effects of this framing has been figured out. And the two directors of this staged scene—Eileen Cowin and Jonesy (aka David Jones)—know that you know it as well as they do. 

Why are we here with Cowin (the woman) and Jonesy (the cowboy)? How did we get here? 

Writing about the evolution of Telling Them Apart, curator David Evans Frantz relays how Jonesy first encountered Cowin’s Family Docudrama series (1980–83) as a student at Tyler School of Art in Philadelphia during the late 1980s. This was when Jonesy first experimented with his own staged and constructed photographs referencing family narratives. By then, Cowin had participated in the 1983 Whitney Biennial.  A few years later, art critic Max Kozloff contextualized her depictions and compared them to Cindy Sherman’s, in a timely essay about the influences of mass media in the 1970s and 1980s on the directed photographic image. In “Through the Narrative Portal,” Kozloff observed that, “To engage with Cowin’s and Sherman’s images is to be addressed by a gesture at once inviting and belligerent, so that viewers are literally forced to realize their stakes in the representation.”¹

In 2019, Jonesy approached Cowin about his interest in producing photographs inspired by her cinematic use of suspense, melodramatic lighting, highly-coded and gendered role play, and her depictions of men gathered together and relating to one another, in photographs such as Untitled [man at window/three men-blinds diptych] (1988). In this tableau by Cowin, Jonesy interpreted her male subjects as “queer” in the homosocial, voyeuristic, and sexually charged potential of their poses. ² Jonesy’s 2021 series, Provided You Are Male, Of Course, paid direct homage to Cowin’s noirish use of Venetian blinds as a narrative device signaling surveillance and voyeurism, in his forthright yet stylized depictions of erotic encounters between men, both observing and knowingly being observed. 

These stories of looking are also about witnessing—here too we, as viewers, are forced to realize our stakes in representation. This is made more pronounced in Telling Them Apart by the installation of Jonesy Presents Hot Action at Artpace (2022). Four plainly fabricated plywood booths fitted with Venetian blinds and glory holes evoke both deer hunting blinds and peep show closets. Within these spaces, vignettes from Jonesy’s Buddy Booth video series (2022–2023) were screened. Created in collaboration with artist/choreographer Lindsey Taylor during Jonesy’s residency at Artpace San Antonio in 2022, the Buddy Booth clips subvert expectations by presenting a queer, primarily female cast who lay claim to the spaces for performing and reimagining the codes of gay male sexuality.³

It is interesting to think about Cowin’s still docudramas of heterosexual desire from the late 1980s and early 1990s in relation to Jonesy’s contemporary works about gay male cruising in Telling Them Apart. Recently, art historian George Baker has explored ideas about relationality in photography. The author, who had earlier called for an “expanded field” for photography in contemporary transformations, has acknowledged that the “expansion of form is always relational, a movement toward something else, a development with and into something else.”⁴ Writing in a 2020 essay about Sharon Lockhart for October magazine, Baker focused upon her appropriation of an image of two boys reading Braille, taken by German portrait and documentary photographer August Sander, entitled Blind Children (1930). Lockhart consciously remade Blind Children in untitled (2007) by creating a staged portrait of two girls who were studying at the Braille Institute in Los Angeles. Lockhart consulted the girls, collaborating with them to achieve the final pose. While taking up the same subject matter as Sander, but not hewing perfectly to it, nor using the same methods, the differences in Lockhart’s image become as important as the similarities. To Baker, in effect this sets up, “a spiraling series of relationships between the photographs, an image that echoes another image but will not, cannot, coincide with it. The relationship is not in the manner of the frozen and static replica that is the copy, but produces rather a dance of variation, a proliferation of so many differences—an otherness within the image.”⁵

Such a dance of variation and non-coincident doubling is instantiated in Cowin’s Untitled [couple/dresser with letter] (1986) and Jonesy’s Kenji & Ricky at Four Months (2023). In each image, a couple stands in front of a dresser with a mirror stand. Both depict power dynamics at play: one partner looks confidently in the mirror, while the second partner stands behind in a more submissive pose. In Cowin’s case, she is discretely withdrawing a folded paper from her husband Jay’s right pocket—might it be a rival’s love note with details about an impending assignation? In Jonesy’s photo, the scenario is more ambiguous. In queer “hanky code,” the blue bandana in Ricky’s left pocket signifies his role as a top or a dom. Kenji tugs at the pocket, while holding Ricky possessively. Is this a scene of endearment or is Kenji signaling that he is not yet ready to let go? 

There are other forms of doubling in Telling Them Apart relating to historic cinema. Cowin’s indebtedness to the noir tradition, with its brooding, stylized theatricality and plots of moral ambiguity, has long been noted. Film studio photographers of the 1940s and 1950s were hired to produce evocative black and white narrative publicity portraits from the latest thrillers for use in movie theater lobbies and outdoor display cabinets to tantalize movie audiences. Cowin utilized this visual strategy to great effect in photos such as Untitled [telephone booth/blindfolded man] (1991). 

Jonesy makes reference to the erotic thriller of the 1980s, a time when the pursuit of sexual desire was a hazardous preoccupation in movies such as Fatal Attraction (1987), Body Double (1984), and Dressed to Kill (1980). While predominantly presenting heterosexual stories, it has been noted how closely such films tracked general anxiety about HIV and AIDS, then an unimpeded and catastrophic pandemic. 

The artist also alludes to the genre of grand history painting, with all its attendant allegories, in tableaux such as Erotic Thriller Study #14 (2022) produced in collaboration with interdisciplinary artist Matt Savitsky. In this case, one painting that comes to mind is The Raft of the Medusa (1819) by French Romantic artist Théodore Géricault—at the time, a scandalous depiction of a tragic true event, as much awash in the erotic poses of the shipwreck’s survivors as by the overwhelming presence of death. 

Another obvious doubling for both Cowin and Jonesy has to do with a knowing deployment of gendered sartorial cliché. For Cowin, the “woman” wears heels and a flared taffeta skirt or sheath dress. The “men” are in trench coats and wool felt fedoras. Equally, the accouterments of Jonesy’s subjects are stereotypically encoded, whether they are “ranch hands” in boots, denim, and cowboy hats or “gym bunnies” in tank tops, 1980s-era dolphin shorts, and Nike sneakers.

In his analysis of time and memory in cinema, philosopher Gilles Deleuze addresses the cliché by referring to how our brains use images from the senses to coordinate our thoughts and actions. Citing phenomenologist Henri Bergson, Deleuze says, “we do not perceive the thing or the image in its entirety, we always perceive less of it, we perceive only what we are interested in perceiving, or rather what it is in our interest to perceive, by virtue of our economic interests, ideological beliefs and psychological demands. We therefore normally perceive only clichés.”⁶

Gender stereotypes are one filter through which people are perceived. Certainly, much has been said over the past several decades about the oppressive aspects of such objectification. But another play of signification transpires in Telling Them Apart. Each artist knowingly stages stereotypes and thereby sets their sight on gender performativity. Philosopher and gender studies scholar Judith Butler has said that gender is neither a noun nor a set of free-floating attributes. Rather, gender is “performatively produced and compelled by the regulatory practices of gender coherence.” Gender constitutes the identity it is purported to be, Butler says. In this respect, “gender is always a doing, though not a doing by a subject who might be said to preexist the deed.”⁷ It is a normative social action—the way in which speech, text, and symbolism can bring identity into being. However, performativity is categorically different from performance, which is a conscious and deliberate artistic enactment for an audience. There can be no doubt that Cowin and Jonesy have pushed gender depictions from the performative to performance. 

It is appropriate to think about the dance of variation and proliferation of difference that comes into play in the jostling from performative gendering to performance in Telling Them Apart. Such relationality was the conceit behind a fascinating interdisciplinary treatise, Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life, written in the early 1970s by feminist anthropologist Marilyn Strathern and published in 2016. In this book, Strathern wrote about the need for anthropologists to consider the manner in which people think, “to take into account how they represent this behavior, how they perceive acts, how the acts are fitted into stereotypes, dogmas, myths.”⁸ Strathern specifically addresses how parodic and exaggerated rituals of stereotype and sexual mythology can “say things” about other areas of social life.⁹ In the book’s introduction, Sarah Franklin, a sociologist and Director of the lgbtQ+ initiative at the University of Cambridge, brings Strathern’s 1970s language to the contemporary moment: 

Insofar as gender is a relation, a set of uses, a set of tools, a way of thinking, a social mechanism, a model of society, a worldmaking idiom, a facsimile, an identity, an institution, or a code, it is also a way of asking questions. In its role as a paradigm for social relationships gender is also a means of questioning categories and relations. (Franklin in Strathern, et. al. p. xliii)

Returning to the titular image of Telling Them Apart—of a woman watching a man walk away from her at dawn—there are certainly many questions that remain. However, now we might be able to answer at least one posited at the beginning of this review. How did we get here? If Eileen Cowin is the stereotypic mother/sister/friend/lover, then she also represents burgeoning ideas about sexual identity and the emergence of feminist aesthetic constructions of desire. Jonesy is a direct beneficiary of Cowin’s particular line of questioning in the 1980s and 1990s. She, however, does not expect Jonesy to be beholden to her or her enactments of gendered ritual. She and he know that for him to explore the emancipatory potential of photography, he must keep moving forward. We, as witnesses, see that he does, however, turn to acknowledge her gaze, looking back in a way that says goodbye. 

Telling Them Apart: Eileen Cowin and Jonesy, curated by David Evans Frantz
UCR Arts California Museum of Photography
Riverside, California
January 27–July 21, 2024

1. Artforum. April 1986, v. 24, n. 8, p. 97  ↩︎
2. Telling Them Apart: Eileen Cowin and Jonesy exhibition brochure, p. 9 ↩︎
3. Ibid, p. 10. ↩︎
4. George Baker. 2023. Lateness and Longing: On the Afterlife of Photography. Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, p. 34 ↩︎
5. Gilles Deleuze. 1989. Cinema 2: The Time Image. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. p. 20  ↩︎
6. George Baker. 2020. “Sharing Seeing.” October. Fall 2020. p. 167 ↩︎
7. Judith Butler. 1989. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge. pp. 24-25 ↩︎
8. Marilyn Strathern and Judith Butler. 2016. Before and After Gender: Sexual Mythologies of Everyday Life. Edited by Sarah Franklin. Chicago: Hau Books. p. 7 ↩︎
9. Strathern, et. al. p. 40 ↩︎