Cowan

John (1929-1979). English photographer. During the 1960s, in England, it was still possible to meet weird and genial characters such as John Cowan. Born in Kent, he left home in search of fortune at the age of 16, got married at 20, worked for an auto dealer, a travel agency, and in a pub. Dazzled by photography, he moved to London and began taking pictures of young people, jazz musicians, and theater actors, rightly convinced that these themes represented the new era of reportage. He was impudent (in 1959 he simply took his photos to Kodak, and thereby obtained the chance to show them in a large personal exhibit), elegant, charming, and exaggerated in his way of life, even in the eyes of an anti-bourgeois photographer friend of his like Terence Donovan. A typical representative of the culture of the early 1960s, Cowan interpreted the style of Mary Quant to perfection, but he identified especially with the world of film: with the James Bond films he shares the choice of the irrepressible beauty of the Bond girls and the dynamism of the shots. Not forgetting his beginnings as an excellent “street photographer,” he transmitted everything contained in his reportages by means of a 35mm reflex camera. He often took photos of models who were very young and not yet famous while they carried on in front of various London institutions, for example marching right in front of the Queen’s guards at Buckingham Palace or flirting in front of the Stock Exchange. But he also shot true reportages that looked like short films produced all over the world in extreme situations where women ride in the desert, drive cars and motorboats, and appear next to helicopters, as in one celebrated photo feature (a reference to From Russia With Love, the second of Bond film, was obvious). He began to publish in Queen and immediately after for The Observer, Sunday Times, Daily Express, Daily Mirror, and Daily Mail. He then went to Vogue, where Diana Vreeland gave him carte blanche. This was the time of his personal and professional relationship with the model Jill Kennington, who he discovered, launched, and simultaneously subjected to his very demanding needs as a photographer. When the relationship ended in 1965, Cowan opened a modelling agency and moved into an enormous loft in Prince Palace where he lived and worked. This was the studio where Michelangelo Antonioni shot Blow-up in 1966 and it was evident that the photographer-protagonist was a sort of synthesis between the exaggerations of David Bailey and those of John Cowan. The following year he worked for Kubrick on the initial sequence of the rising sun in 2001: A Space Odyssey. It was his last important job and his style was no longer popular. He closed his studio and moved to Italy, where he worked with Oliviero Toscani, and then started to travel again. He was soon forgotten by that public which had adored him, and only in 1999 did the beautiful monograph John Cowan-Through the Light Barrier give him back his rightful fame. It was too late for the eccentric photographer, whose funeral was also somewhat cinematographic: with all those beautiful ex wives and ex fiancées, it reminded one of the final scene in L’Homme qui aimait les femmes by Truffaut.