Gloria Lynne, Newport Jazz

An artist dedicated to the sounds and philosophies of jazz, Cowans makes photographs that echo the genre’s unbounded rhythms, moods, and improvisations. In this 1963 portrait of jazz singer Gloria Lynne, he uses the tone-reversing technique of solarization to create a confounding and enthralling portrait of Blackness, adapting jazz abstraction to the medium of photography. Here, the myth of race, believed to be partially indexed in the skin, is evoked yet undermined by an abstracting, monochromatic, darkroom technique. Cowans does not offer a literal, legible portrait of Lynne; rather, silver outlines conjure an ethereal manifestation of the vocalist’s spirit. Lynne’s singing was once described in language that corresponds to Cowans’s vision of her: she “shook it apart, disintegrating it and reintegrating it in revitalized shape.”



Cowans’s attraction to jazz and passion for photography was shared by his fellow artists in the Kamoinge Collective, a community of African American photographers founded in 1963 and still in existence. The longest running photography collective in the United States and the most influential and rigorous group for the evolution and critique of Black photography, Kamoinge originated in Harlem, New York, establishing the city as a unique nexus for Black photography. Cowans was an early member of the collective and like many in the group, he was an astute, committed, experimental, and visionary photographer who focused on street photography, printing expertise, and depicting a broad spectrum of Black experiences. With a background as both a painter and photographer, Cowans distinctively connected abstract expressionism with photography, Black life, and politics.