About the Images
The Still Life series began as a kind of "play-work", a break from the stresses of working on a decade-long documentation of Jewish sites in North Africa and its contextual extension, an exploration of Moroccan Islamic architecture and artisanal traditions. In an essay published last summer in Large Format Journal (UK), Cowles wrote: "In the outskirts of Marrakech one day I found a pottery and just began to work in the back room... Using some fruit as a jump off point, I began to construct still lifes and photograph them. Later, I would put still lifes together with whatever I happened to have, wherever I happened to be... In Montreal, I began to work in a spare room in a metal worker's studio, taking odd pieces of scrap metal and working with planes, shapes, light and shadow. These are purely photographic exercises, not painterly... They are a kind of architecture built out of light, darkness, sharp and soft focus-using these things as building blocks and split planes. Borrowing something of the artisanal aesthetic, they are inventive meditations with light and focus."