“Between Panic and Paradise,” Eileen Cowin’s penetrating retrospective at LACMA, begins in the present, with large, recent color photographs and her newest work, a stirring video. The show then veers back to early work, photographic transparencies with magazine transfers made in the late 1960s and early ‘70s, and continues, gallery by gallery, oscillating between different periods of the artist’s nearly six-decade career.
By deviating from straightforward chronology, the installation resonates smartly with one of Cowin’s key operating principles — that we don’t experience time as a continuous line moving in one direction, but as episodic, fragmented, interrupted, layered. Clock hands circle predictably and calendar pages turn on schedule, but internally, within our bodies, minds and hearts, time is a whole different thing — discontinuous, wondrous, searing.
Cowin was born in Brooklyn in 1947 and attended graduate school at the Institute of Design in Chicago. She began teaching on the East Coast, and showing work that combined photographic imagery with printmaking techniques, collage and stitching. In 1975 she settled for good in Los Angeles, home base to Robert Heinecken, one of the most consequential practitioners of material experimentation in photography. It was an especially fertile period for photography, and L.A. artists were catalytic in elevating the medium’s stature and expanding its range.
Cowin soon shifted to straighter technical methods applied to crooked storylines. She’s become most influential for her staged photography, choreographed decisive moments shot in both color and black and white. In her lauded “Family Docudrama” series (1980-84), Cowin cast herself, her husband and stepkids as characters in suggestive, often tense scenes set in the bedroom, dining room and garage.
Eileen Cowin, Untitled, 1980-83, printed 1999, from the series Family Docudrama.
(Eileen Cowin / Museum Associates/ LACMA)
In one inexhaustible untitled image from 1980, the couple sits in elegant dress at a candlelit table engrossed in each other’s company, while the young, shirtless son adjusts the channel on a television perched on the near side of the same table. The space is shallow and compressed, like a theater set, and details are few and deliberate. The one picture hanging on the wall is another of Cowin’s images from the same series. The scene thrums with the complexity of domestic life, the simultaneity of partnering and parenting, as well as of looking, being looked at, being overlooked, and being visually represented.
From the earliest days of photography, artists have staged tableaux for the camera, often using painting and literature as inspiration. Think 19th century photographic storytellers Julia Margaret Cameron and Oscar Gustave Rejlander. There was enough of a resurgence in the 1970s to merit a new term, the “directorial mode,” coined by critic A.D. Coleman to categorize Duane Michals, William Wegman, Les Krims and others. Cowin has brought the tradition up to date beginning in the late 1970s by suffusing her work with the look and feel of cinema and television (close-ups, storyboard-style progression), and the centering of women’s experience in the narrative.
In terms of narrative, Cowin is a wry disruptor. She has spoken of her interest in lying and duplicity, and has consistently, fruitfully, positioned her work on the border of fiction and nonfiction. The “Family Docudrama” series and much that followed read as something like autofiction, drawn from life but juiced up, rephrased, with gestures and incidents isolated and amplified. Cowin may appear as the subject in her photographs, but she is primarily the narrator, an intriguingly unreliable narrator who recognizes the inevitability of multiple, simultaneous truths.
Eileen Cowin, “New Hampshire,” 1971.
(Eileen Cowin / LACMA/Museum Associates)
In those earliest works using magazine transfers, Cowin layered disjunctive images, visually uniting realities that can’t easily be reconciled emotionally. In “New Hampshire” (1971), for instance, a man is seen with a camera to his eye in a peaceful moment beside a lake, with a spectral image of Vietnam War soldiers next to him in the frame. There is panic, and there is paradise.
In “Shot” (1976), from another early series, Cowin engages in canny word/image play, pairing photographs of men being shot by guns (including Lee Harvey Oswald) with handwritten dictionary definitions of the word “shot.” The definitions appear below the frames, reminding us that the men were not just shot with a firearm but also by a camera, shot being shot.
Circularity and self-referentiality are mainstays in Cowin’s work, wry disruptor that she is. She frequently puts pictures within pictures, deepening and doubling the story being told and making it deliciously clear that what we are seeing is constructed, not found. We’re also made acutely aware of what we’re not seeing, that no picture is the whole picture and there is narrative power in the denial of sight and therefore knowledge. Figures in Cowin’s work are often blindfolded or covering their eyes with their hands.
Eileen Cowin, “The Uninvited Visitor,” 2025, printed 2026.
(Eileen Cowin)
Cowin’s own restraint and withholding yield images of distilled power. Over decades, she has isolated subjects within unarticulated fields of solid black: figures in domestic scenarios; book spines; actors embodying untold emotion, as in the multichannel video installation, “Fear Itself” (2014) and her potent new color photographs, “The Uninvited Visitor” (2025). Cowin has also spliced together photographs of disparate subjects — people, places and things — on broad horizontal panels that suggest narrative progression but instead register as evocative panoramic poems. In 2010, she titled a piece (not in the current show) “If I Knew More, I Would Tell You.” But she wouldn’t. She hasn’t. She has made an art out of felt, remembered and imagined experience, not accumulated information.
Her new video, “Another Year Closer to Death” (2026) is unusually declarative and openly autobiographical. Cowin addresses us directly, sharing her anxieties about aging, particularly the varieties of physical decline. It’s a tender, naked and amusing personal essay, grounded in the now while looking both backward and forward.
Still from Eileen Cowin’s “Another Year Closer to Death,” 2025.
(Eileen Cowin)
“Between Panic and Paradise” was organized by Rebecca Morse, curator of LACMA’s Wallis Annenberg Photography Department, and Britt Salvesen, curator and department head of the Wallis Annenberg Photography Department and the Prints and Drawings Department, with curatorial assistant Hope Flores. The show is accompanied by Cowin’s first full-scale monograph. True to the show’s structure, and the work it addresses, the book disavows conventional narrative and linear time to make good on a quip attributed to Jean-Luc Godard cited within that “a story should have a beginning, middle, and end — though not necessarily in that order.”
