The self-conscious awareness that we live in a camera-based and camera-bound culture marks the so-called postmodernist vein of art and photography that emerged in the early 1980s. This kind of art accepts the world as a place of images, an endless hall of mirrors where images are not only all we can see but also all we can ever know of reality. Concepts of originality and individual artistic vision have little relevance in this world. These are disconcerting and radical ideas, and photography, considered a very nearly indiscriminate producer of images, figures largely in them.
Since 1980 Eileen Cowin has made photographic tableaux that she at one time called "family docudramas." Referring loosely to television soap opera vignettes, film stills, or even romance comic strips, these elegant photographs represent arranged family situations that imply discord. Cowin uses herself as a foil, at times including her identical twin sister as well as other family members. In a scene such as this, where both twins appear, the two women read as one, embodying the ambiguity of the participant and observer, of reality and fantasy, of anxious ego and critical superego.
In the customary formalized sittings and casual snapshots of family life, conflicts and tensions stemming from envy or dissension are suppressed. In contrast, even though her tableaux are artifices painstakingly mounted in the studio, Cowin's images evoke a sense of confrontation, an arrested and enigmatic interaction that has no single meaning. They assume the emotions, sympathies, and interpretations that the viewer brings to them.
