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Though Eileen Cowin did not move to Los Angeles until 1975, she has acknowledged a strong LA influence beginning in 1968. In that year a college instructor introduced her to the work of Robert Heinecken, which she took as affirmation of her own independent experiments.

Cowin credits the Museum of Modern Art’s Photography in Sculpture exhibition with expanding geographical and conceptual boundaries. The exhibition, she says,

was one of the most important photography shows in the last thirty years. I saw that show when I was still in graduate school in Chicago: my impression was that most of the artists were from Los Angeles and had some connection to Robert Heinecken. From where I was, the Institute of Design in Chicago, Los Angeles suddenly took on the appeal of Paris in the 1920s and Black Mountain College.

Cowin made several Los Angeles trips in the early 1970s to visit friends. During that time she had a particularly close relationship with Robert Fichter, whose work and ideas both influenced the Los Angeles scene and borrowed from it. By the time she moved to the West Coast to teach at California State University, Fullerton, she had already established a solid national reputation for alternative-process photographic work.

Her work changed rapidly after the move, evolving into the complex dramatic tableaux that have won her recognition as a major figure in contemporary art. Shot, 1978, is an important transitional work. One of a series of works examining relationships between words and pictures, this piece (and other Cowin works of the same period) also anatomizes generally accepted systems of photographic depiction. The picture on the left is, of course, a photograph of a widely known photograph purporting to prove that Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald. The numbing familiarity of the picture of Ruby and Oswald distances us from the original event—we tend not to read the picture as a report, so much as an emblem, like a trademark, an advertising image or a traffic sign. Because it is a black and white image, and because two edges of the original photograph are visible, the “pictureness” of the Ruby/Oswald image is emphasized, at the expense of the immediacy and shock the image originally invoked.

The picture on the right, on the other hand, is in color and frames a situation not previously known to us; we read it as a little window on the world. Never mind that this picture was likely staged for the camera: syntactically it appears to be a more “real” event than the historically recognized one. Never mind that in the second panel the photographer—and by extension, the viewer—is implicated as the shooter: it’s only a photograph.