mitch cowardin

Mitch Cowardin was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia. His first darkroom, at the age of fifteen, was his bedroom. After studying photography and philosophy at Virginia Commonwealth University, he packed his VW and attended the summer program at Lake Placid School of Art, then drove cross country to San Francisco. Based on his work, he received one-year grant to attend the San Francisco Art Institute, where he studied with Jack Fulton and Pirkle Jones, among others. He has studied under Mark Citret and learned the platinum-palladium process from Kerik Kouklis, further refining his technique with workshops taught by Jon Cone in Vermont.

His photos have appeared in New Delta Review, the San Francisco magazine Photo Metro, and the book “Form and Magic” (1997: PhotoCentral, Hayward, CA). Cowardin has won numerous awards, including in 2010 the best in show in a national competition judged by Drew Johnson, Curator of Photography at the Oakland Museum, who called his photos “museum quality.”

Cowardin moved to San Miguel in 2017, where his work is represented by Photographic Gallery SMA, where he had a solo show of his platinum-palladium prints in the fall of 2020.

Artist Statement:

I’ve been passionate about photography since I was a teenager. For me, the camera offers a different way of looking at the world, one in which commonplace objects and little pieces of ‘reality,’ are transformed into something else, something magical. I believe in alternate realities and unorthodox perspectives. Our world is not exactly as it seems and there is so much that we can see if we learn to look at it with fresh eyes. The focus of many of my images is on the elusive and transforming qualities of light. Light, of course, makes vision possible. What it reveals depends on the angle, the source, the location, and of course the eye of the photographer.