Art and Career
His work often incorporates elements of collage and painting. He studied photography with Elaine Mayes at the Tisch School of the Arts in New York. His early images made at age 20 of prostitution in the meat district in New York City are in the permanent collection of the New York Historical Society.
Cowen continued his career in photography when he worked as assistant for master American photographers Larry Clark from 1988–1990, and Ralph Gibson from 1990-1992. At the beginnings of their careers, Clark was the assistant of W. Eugene Smith and Gibson was the assistant of Dorothea Lange.
From 1988 to 1994, Cowen photographed the tough neighborhoods of New York. He began teaching photography at LEAP in 1994.
At LEAP, Cowen met and mentored the young but brilliant illegal immigrant Dan-el Padilla helping him to earn a scholarship to Collegiate School in New York City. Success at Collegiate School led Padilla to a scholarship at Princeton University where he graduated with the highest distinction and was offered full scholarship at Oxford University. Due to Padilla's illegal immigrant status, Padilla and Cowen were both featured in an article in the Wall Street Journal that highlighted some of the absurdity and rigidity of U.S. immigration laws.
At age 23, Cowen's images of the Romanian Revolution appeared in: The Manchester Guardian, Tel Aviv Post, Yomiru Shimbun, Asahi Shimbun. Cowen then took up drawing and anatomy (1994–1995) at the Art Students League of New York with the intention of using his drawing skills to further his photographic art.
In 2001, he based himself in Paris, France. He was awarded the Thomas Cooke Award for Photography. In 2005, his first monograph was published by Paris Musees. That monograph contains his early New York work and his painterly Mural collages of nudes. In 2007, Cowen collaborated with filmmaker and writer Andre Labarthe founder of the Cahiers du cinéma for his exhibition called The Lotus Eaters, inspired by a story in Homer's 'The Odyssey'. Currently, Jeff Cowen is based in Berlin, Germany, and Paris, France.
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