Santa Monica

Men in trench coats and women in negligees engaged in tense nocturnal dramas are the subjects of several of Eileen Cowin’s recent large-format Cibachrome photographs. From grade-B thrillers she has distilled a small vocabulary of pose, dress and circumstantial evidence (an unmade bed, a crumpled paper) to create familiar stock characters (killer, detective, victim). But the increased self-consciousness of these images creates a stifling quality.

Unlike the wonderfully ambiguous actors in Cowin’s earlier tableaux, these film noir folks are not of much interest to us as people--they’re just stand-ins outfitted by the costume department. Whether the intense and highly controlled stylization of the narrative “language” in these photographs offsets the loss of human values is surely open to question.

A pair of outsized black-and-white prints offers richer, freer ways of honing in on the vocabulary of human posture without milking cliches. In one image, a blindfolded man in a fedora and trench coat braces himself like a basketball guard against a concrete wall. In the other shot, he turns facing the wall, his hands clasped behind his back, and seems to be hounded by a large, shaggy shadow, possibly his own.

Is this about fear? Self-preservation? Punishment? Humiliation? Perhaps the man is a mental patient and we are observing his behavior as captured on a remote camera? Each photograph is framed by a soft-edged rectangle that suggests the contents are to be viewed in a distanced, studied way. But at least we have something provocative to play with. (Roy Boyd Gallery, 1547 10th St., to April 29.)