Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility
Adger Cowans: Sense and Sensibility features photographs that articulate beauty within the human condition through awareness of the interplay between mind, body, and soul. Integral to Adger's existence, his work is a conscious effort to remain "…close to the natural movement of the universe through the vibrancy of life." Henri Cartier Bresson, the pioneer of street photography, coined the term "the decisive moment" -- the visual and psychological elements of people in natural life scenes, spontaneously and briefly, coming together to represent the essence of the event itself. Conversely, Adger attaches his emotions to the subject he sees before clicking the shutter. "I take a picture with my heart, not with my eyes. The eyes see what the heart feels. You must be there first—recognizing pain, joy, or whatever—to show it to the viewer. That is the artist's job." The philosophical mooring for his field of vision is: "The spirit can traverse the heavens and earth instantly because most of what we think of as our mind is just the chatter of our ego. The heart can receive Divine manifestations, and our body can heighten states of awareness and perception." This has been Adger's footpath to defining the course for his destiny. Thus, enabling him to embrace to witness a series of inter-and intra-personal relationships that celebrate love, culture, and beauty within life's vibrancy.
Adger is a celebrated American photographer whose evolution began in the 20th century. How does the experience of history impact the way one sees? What shapes an individual and their convictions? How does Black culture cultivate a passion for humanity and celebration? In the beginning, the precise date for the birth of Adger Cowans and the ideas that would develop a keen vision is September 19, 1936. An American Black boy emerged when President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected for a second term. The New Deal successfully inspired citizens to remain courageous, strong and determined to survive the tough times. Jesse Owens won four gold medals at the Berlin Olympics, and Joe Louis triumphed in 48 of 51 fights. In addition, Duke Ellington made the classic recording Caravan, and Arturo Toscanini held his farewell performance at Carnegie Hall. Adolph Hitler, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini were at the helm of spreading Fascism throughout Europe and beyond. At the same time, South Africa passed the Representation of Natives Act, allowing Black people to register to vote but not run for office. America's Jim Crow laws were ever-present, keeping Black people powerless, segregated, and barred from many jobs and entering public places like restaurants and hotels. At the same time, the big band swing (1935-1946) of Count Basie, Duke Ellington, Cab Calloway, Benny Goodman, Fletcher Henderson, Earl Hines, Artie Shaw, Jimmy, and Tommy Dorsey, and Glenn Miller helped the nation make sense of the world.
On this first day from Utero to Earth, all the elements in the universe contributed to Beatrice L. and Adger W. Cowan's necessity to instill the values of self-love, family, community, appreciation for music, art, and culture in their son. Like many African Americans, Adger's parents embraced Franklin D. Roosevelt's paragon of Four Freedoms during World War II (1939-1945) – freedom of speech, worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear – while many Americans lacked these liberties. The sum of these historic events etched an idealized release from the strictures of systemic and overt racism and classism, which remains evident in Adger's consistent comportment of ease. He consciously refuses to allow the perceptions of others to distract him from himself or the world. "I was Black when I was born, and I have had to deal with it all my life" His mother, a pianist, said, "If someone calls you a name, they do not know who you are. It is on them, not you. I have never forgotten this."
As Adger continues working into his ninth decade, one cannot discount the thread of history and music that played a significant role in maintaining his perspective on living in an imperfect world. A lifetime of conflicting ideologies about American freedom, democracy, race, and art provides a framework for a layered appreciation for humanity's intellectual and creative diversity, focusing on Black people. Adger grew up in a mid-western community with strong family ties, entrepreneurialism, and camaraderie. These qualities cultivated innovation and excellence among Americans of African descent like himself. People, events, and sounds provide a filter for his emotional compass that mirrors images and ideologies reflecting the human condition. Adger has been able to withstand the critical arcs of American history with a graceful awareness while simultaneously funneling the world through his heart and lens. The earlier ideas of Roosevelt's Four Freedoms became personal because of his family's military history.
When President Harry S. Truman had integrated the U.S. Armed Forces (1948) via an executive order to mandate that: "there shall be equality of treatment and opportunity for all persons in the armed services without regard to race, color, religion, or national origin, it meant as much as when, the Tuskegee Airmen (1940-1948) saw combat against German and Italian troops, flying more than 3,000 missions. After the first chorus, saxophonist Charlie Parker led Bebop's departure from Swing to improvisation without melodies. This impactful evolution was the basis for all music innovations that followed. Jackie Robinson became a source of pride, inspiration, hope, and contradiction for many as his larger-than-life presence integrated baseball. He led the Dodgers to six league championships and one World Series victory. Adger's photographs assert that a requirement of civilized life is the conquest of the world by individual accountability. In doing so, his ability to let go of self-obsession to become the world personified through his images.
As a teenager with a paper route, he loved the social dynamic of discussing varied perspectives with people about current affairs. He was aware of the Supreme Court ruling in Brown v Board of Education (1954), the Museum of Modern Art's Family of Man exhibition curated by Edward Steichen (1954), and the publication of Langston Hughes and Roy DeCarava's Sweet Flypaper of Life (1955). Just four years older, the murder of Emmett Louis Till (1955) was devastating. The civil disobedience of Rosa Parks (1955), the Montgomery Bus Boycott (1955-1956), and The National Guard, under the directive of President Eisenhower (1957), enforced the integration of the Central High school in Little Rock, Arkansas was part of his consciousness. Cool jazz (the late 1940s-1950s) interrupted Bebop (early to mid-1940s) with a mixture of Bop and Swing, where harmonic dynamics softened, and the ensemble arrangement regained importance. These innovators included Lester Young, Milt Jackson, Chet Baker, Dave Brubeck, Buster Harding, Gerry Valentine, Shorty Rogers, Budd Johnson, Gerry Mulligan, Bill Evans, and vocalists Billie Holiday, Sarah Vaughn, and Lillie-Mae "Betty Carter" Jones. Hard Bop (the mid-1950s) revitalized Be-Bop and tended to be more soulful with highlights from Rhythm & Blues and Gospel themes with a more sophisticated rhythm section with Charles Mingus, Horace Silver, Art Blakey, and John Coltrane, to name a few. The FDA approved the birth control pill in 1960. The Civil Rights Act (1964) was passed to protect citizens against discrimination based on race, religion, sex, or national origin, thereby mandating the desegregation of public accommodations and establishing the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
The reshaping of a democracy ushered the Voting Rights Act (1965) to ensure the protection of the rights of Black Americans after the Selma to Montgomery marchers were shamelessly beaten by Alabama State troopers (1965). The Fair Housing Act (1968) addressed racial discrimination in housing units' sale, rental, or financing. The 1960s was wrought with bloodshed and the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy (1963), Malcolm X (1965), Martin Luther King(1968), and Robert F. Kennedy (1968), who all sought to create equity in what it means to be an American citizen. Moreover, the message is to uphold civil and Divine laws for humanity to internalize. Apollo 11 completed JFK's promise to land a crewed mission on the moon as people mourned. Then the 1978 Supreme court ruling on the University of California v Bakke decision declared affirmative action constitutional but invalidated racial quotas, became the most important civil rights decision since legal segregation in the United States (the 1870s-1965). Jesse Jackson galvanized Black voters throughout the 1980s, which led to the first Black mayor of Chicago in 1983. Oprah Winfrey launched her syndicated Talk Show in 1986, and Los Angeles Riots(1991) began when California Highway Patrol murdered Rodney King. The Million Man March (1995) brings hundreds of thousands of sober, disciplined, committed, dedicated, and inspired Black men to Washington, DC, for a day of atonement and solidarity in personal responsibility to improve their lives and disprove persistent stereotypes of Black men in America. Colin Powell became the first Black Joint Chief of Staff (1989-1993) and Secretary of State (2001-2004). Barack Obama became the 44th and first Black President of the United States (2008-2016), and the Black Lives Matter Movement began with the death of Trayvon Martin in 2013. It continues to protest with the mission to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes.
History as a garment for self-awareness permitted Adger to freely follow his convictions as a participant/observer, simultaneous to the rise of photography from the margins of art to its vital center. His study of photography was unique because his teacher, Minor White, could call and take his class to visit W. Eugene Smith in his darkroom to discuss prints because there were few books or exhibitions about photography in the 1950s and 1960s. Adger also saw his teacher's extensive collection of Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, and Alfred Stieglitz's work to learn what makes a good print and composition. As the father of American Photography, exposure to Alfred Stieglitz profoundly impacted Adger's approach to making pictures. He asserted that the photographic medium was as legitimate an art form as painting. Much of Adger's thinking about photography is consistent with Stieglitz's perspective that photographs can have emotion as much as paintings. Stieglitz's gallery 291 elevated art photography to the same stature as painting and sculpture by pioneering photographers like Edward Steichen, Alvin Langdon Coburn, Gertrude Kasebier, and Clarence H. White. Stieglitz's vision and doctrine challenged Adger to query what a photograph is about? What do I see? What do I feel? The opportunity to see some of Stieglitz's photos of Georgia O'Keefe, real-life landscapes, and street scenes, captured atmospheric uses of light and inspired Adger's ongoing fascination with the way light bends and sits on the surface of his subjects.
Adger's immersion in the 1960s art and music scene completely opened as many doors as ideas for exploration. In 1963 Andy Warhol made the famed photo silkscreen painting, Ambulance Disaster,1963-64, and it influenced Robert Rauschenberg's Crocus, 1962. The newspaper, photograph silkscreen techniques were coined a pigment collage, and photography began to be used as a source of material to make art. Like Warhol, Edward Ruscha, a West Coast graphic designer turned artist, launched a project to photograph twenty-six gasoline stations on highways between Los Angeles and Oklahoma. Twenty-Six Gasoline Stations was the first book of photographs considered a conceptually innovative form of contemporary artwork because its use was unprecedented. It also represented a new kind of artist's book without the pretensions of hard-set type, deluxe bindings, and other markers of earlier artistic production. Its conceptual creation through an artist process and execution was groundbreaking. Twenty-six Gasoline Stations helped instigate a transition away from an aesthetic based on hand skills to one rooted in the quality of an artist's thought process. The sixties barely registered photography as contemporary art.
The centrifugal center of the photography world was in 1962 at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in New York. Uniquely for its time, "The Modern" had created a photography department in 1940, first led by Beaumont Newhall, whose legendary History of Photography grew out of a 1937 exhibition he curated for the museum. By the sixties, museums in Chicago and San Francisco started to pay attention to photographs and collect them, but MOMA brought the most attention to the medium. In 1962 Harry Callahan, Robert Frank, and Ernst Hass exhibited their work in one-person exhibitions. Shortly after that, John Szarkowski became the new director of photography. Unlike Steichen, whom some felt harnessed the medium to social causes and popular thematic shows, Szarkowski's interest was in vernacular photography snapshots, commercial photographs done by small-town studios, and everyday portraiture. Later they were included in The Photographer's Eye show (1964), that everyday uses of photography form a tradition in which the art of photography arises and finds sustenance. He championed Adger's peers and friends like Diane Arbus, William Eggleston, Lee Friedlander, and Gary Winogrand. Szarkowski maintained that the art of photography resided within the traditions and historical capabilities of the medium itself, not with its interactions with painting, drawing, or any other art medium. It is a "different kind of art," meaning that a photograph's distinction is the medium's independence and uniqueness from other forms of picture-making because it is analytic, not synthetic. This edict reaffirmed all Adger learned in college and taught himself about the medium through experience.
The most consistent element of Adgers' work is sensitivity to the soul of his subjects, the energy of his objects, and his ability to articulate the duplicitous reality of seen and unseen light captured by film. He integrates and vacillates between traditional and experimental modes of expression. He is in perpetual reflection about light itself. His preoccupation with the light on the surface exceeds the basic premise of photography when he asks: What is the picture of light? What is the image of light? What is the embodiment of water through light? Where are the spirits in water? When looking at water and the raw essence of nature, Adger asserts that "they transport me to someplace else, to the eternal and ephemeral simultaneously." He brings a sensitivity to his romantic, present work and, at times, has visual melodies gleaned from his sensibilities as someone who plays the saxophone. Moreover, innovation, improvisation, and feeling are primary to the most successful compositional phrasings of the shades of light, like a saxophone's melody. The Blue Queen is like looking at the sound of Muddy Waters, who electrified the blues- quiet, moody, and serene.
The most insightful image about Adger is Icarus. The silhouette of a person floating in the air beneath the blazing sun reflects Adger's intuitive freedom to exist and navigate the physical world unrestricted in timeless spaces where his intellect, emotion, and soul can soar through the tangible ephemeral light. Herein lies an example of the sensitivity of his soul, which is the seat of his heart. In this sense, Adger feels as if he becomes one with the work, which affirms how interconnection permeates the entire universe and makes us one.
Celebrated as one of the founding members of the first and oldest Black photographers' group since 1963, Adger upholds Kamoinge's mission to "Honor, document and preserve the history and culture of the African Diaspora with integrity and insight for humanity, through the lens of Black Photographers." Adger's expansive career spans many contemporary photography genres, from commercial work, portraiture, landscape, and film to mentoring new photographers. The sum of the experiences of this Columbus, Ohio, native includes earning a BFA in Photography from Ohio University in 1958, where he studied under Clarence H. White Jr. and later with Minor White. Ohio University's first African American student to earn a degree in Photography was Adger Cowans. His studies continued at the School of Motion Picture Arts and School of Visual Arts in New York City. Cowans secured a position assisting photographer Gordon Parks at LIFE Magazine. He also served as a Navy photographer. He has won numerous awards and fellowships. His commercial work includes Hollywood portraits and on-set stills of Al Pacino, Jane Fonda, Katherine Hepburn, and Mick Jagger, as well as Abbey Lincoln, August Wilson, Bill T Jones, Billy Dee Williams, Diahann Carroll, Dionne Warwick, Dizzy Gillespie, Duke Ellington, Faye Dunaway, Gordon Parks, Henry Fonda, Jesse Jackson, Robert Indiana, and Eddie Murphy.
As an innovator, Adger introduced the sound blimp (a housing attachment for a camera to reduce shutter sounds) for his on-set photographs before anyone else. Before the 1960s, photographers who photographed animals were the ones to use them. Adger makes history again as the first Black photographer admitted into the International Photographers and Motion Picture Union, Local 600, in 1969. His work is wide-ranging, including the civil rights movement, jazz musicians, artists, Hollywood celebrities (he was the stills photographer for more than thirty movies), Harlem Street scenes, and personal artistic studies of the human form, water, and light. Gordon Parks called Adger "one of the most significant artists of our time" and noted, "Adger's individualism sets him apart, simply because he follows his convictions. Helen Keller mirrors Adger Cowan's sensibilities for life and photography when she states, "The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched–they must be felt in the heart.”
