“I didn’t own a camera before 2012,” says photojournalist, Jane Cowan. Working as a North America correspondent for the ABC at that time, a trip to Colombia sparked her interest in photography. “I think it was something to do with living overseas and exploring unfamiliar places and cultures that opened my eyes,” she says.
A television and radio journalist with 15 years’ experience, Cowan is familiar with covering hard news stories, including the Black Saturday bushfires in Victoria in 2009. “I have always been a storyteller, but words were my main tool,” she says. “Now I prefer to let pictures tell the story. Photography puts the subject at the centre, rather than a reporter.”
Cowan’s interest in photography became more serious during a trip to India in 2014, shooting alongside documentary photographer and friend, Mitchell Kanashkevich. “For the first two weeks I made terrible images,” she says. “But then something clicked, and the pictures started to happen.”
Less than a year after her trip to India, Cowan entered a Master’s program at the Ohio University School of Visual Communication, specialising in photojournalism. “Training at one of the top photojournalism schools in the world has been an experience that’s changed the way I approach photography and given me a more sophisticated understanding of the craft,” she says.
Human stories are what most interest Cowan. Her approach is that every subject has a potential story, and with the right frame of mind, a photographer can find pictures everywhere. When photographing people, she likes to use the light to evoke an emotional tone. “There is no bad light, depending what you’re trying to say, but any situation where there is unusual light, that’s what gets me in the zone,” she says. Cowan is always looking for candid moments and intimacy. Preferably, she is trying to capture images that are fresh and have something unique to say. “I need to constantly push into new territory and avoid repeating myself,” she says.
Cowan has just returned to Australia after working over the US summer as an intern in the photo department at The Virginian-Pilot [newspaper], working alongside some of the best in the business, including veteran photographers Bill Tiernan and Vicki Cronis-Nohe. Her recent projects deal with hard and topical issues. One is a window into the violence afflicting America, and a kind of meditation on life and death as seen through the eyes of a crime scene cleaner. The other is what she calls an urban love story, about a young couple living with chronic health problems.
Now back home, Cowan is excited about the opportunity to pursue Australian stories. She is keeping an open mind about the subject matter, though she will continue to work on international projects and collaborations as well as local stories. “Often, I don’t know precisely what I’m interested in until I begin photographing,” she says. “Then, it’s the photography that shows me.”
www.janecowanphoto.com
Instagram: @cowanify
