Adger Cowans

Adger Cowans (b. 1936) is an American photographer and painter whose work spans the street life and civil rights movements of 1960s New York, three decades on Hollywood film sets, and a parallel body of abstract painting. One of the founding members of the Kamoinge Workshop, established in New York in 1963 through the merger of two groups of Black photographers, Cowans was also a member of AfriCOBRA from 1978. The name Kamoinge comes from the Kikuyu language of Kenya and refers to a group of people acting together. Cowans was the first Black still photographer admitted to New York’s motion-picture camera union and has served as president of Kamoinge for more than a decade.

Born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1936, Cowans turned down a trumpet scholarship to pursue photography and earned his BFA from Ohio University in 1958, becoming one of the first African American students to receive a degree in the field. He studied with Clarence H. White Jr., served as a Navy photographer, and moved to New York in 1960, where he worked with Gordon Parks at Life and for photographer Henry Clarke. Parks became a lifelong friend and mentor, calling Cowans one of America’s finest photographers. He encouraged Cowans to “turn negative energy into positive power.” As Cowans has said, “Whatever you are translates to your photos,” and therefore, “start from the heart.”

In 1963, Ray Francis recruited Cowans into the newly formed Kamoinge Workshop, where he and Louis Draper were the only members with formal training in the arts and soon became its de facto teachers. Footsteps, Harlem (1961), an aerial view of a lone figure struggling along a snow-covered street, is the image that has come to define his career. Many have read it as a metaphor for the adversity facing Black Americans, but Cowans sees it more broadly as an expression of the human condition. “My images are about all of humanity,” he says. “I follow in the footsteps of my predecessors, who all wanted to make great images.” In Three Shadows (1968) and Icarus (1970), he sets the solitary figure against shifting fields of shadow and light, while his photographs of the civil rights movement document organizations and figures ranging from SNCC and CORE to Malcolm X. In 1962, Cowans received a John Hay Whitney Fellowship, followed by his first solo exhibition, at Heliography Gallery, in 1965.

Admitted to the International Photographers Local 644 in 1969 as its first Black member, Cowans worked as a still photographer on more than thirty productions with directors including Francis Ford Coppola, Sidney Lumet, and Spike Lee. His photographs appeared in Life, Essence, Ebony, and Harper’s Bazaar, and he taught at Wayne State University and the Cleveland Institute of Art.

Since the mid-1960s painting has run alongside his photographic practice.

Cowans applies paint to textured surfaces and casts it onto the canvas in layers, working between them with combs, sticks, serrated edges, electric drills, perforated screens, and the patterned surfaces of crystal to scrape, push, fling, and build up the pigment. He developed this process early and independently, and it later resonated with the work of his friends Ed Clark and Jack Whitten. “Painting is the subject,” he says; “color is the vision, and the vision is life.” Jazz and painting, he has said, are his religion. Describing the act of photographing, he says, “When I take a picture, I feel it. When you get that rush of feeling inside of you—‘I have it, I felt it’—I take a picture with my heart, not my eyes; the eyes see what the heart feels.” His comb paintings grew out of his photographs of water. Broader recognition came with Soul of a Nation at Tate Modern in 2017 and Working Together at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in 2020. Bruce Silverstein Gallery represents Cowans exclusively and has presented Footsteps (2022), an exhibition of more than thirty prints dating from 1955 to the present, and Making His Mark (2025), the first exhibition devoted to his paintings.