Harley Cowan is a photographer based in Portland, Oregon. He is also a practicing architect. His interest in large format photography led to a research fellowship in heritage documentation and preservation with work in the Library of Congress. In 2019, Cowan was inducted into the Atomic Photographers Guild, an international collective founded in 1987, of photographers dedicated to making visible all facets of the nuclear age. Cowan won the 2018 Access Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. In 2018, he was the Artist-in-Residence with the National Park Service at Oregon Caves National Monument & Preserve and won the Access Award from the Vernacular Architecture Forum. He was a speaker for the 2018 Photography Council’s Lecture Series at the Portland Art Museum. He has lectured before the Society of Architectural Historians at their 2017 conference in Victoria, B.C., DoCoMoMo_Oregon, University of Oregon’s Historic Preservation Program, and the Pacific Northwest Preservation Field School.

A graduate of Washington State University, for eight years, Cowan was a member of the Professional Advisory Board for its School of Design & Construction. Early in his career, he spent six years working in nuclear industry. His studies also took him to Far Eastern State Technical University in Vladivostok, Russia where he was the first and only western student to attend.