Photo: Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking, 1977.
Mark Cohen (b. 1943) has been photographing the streets and backyards of his hometown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, for over forty years, creating a series of powerful and provocative images that quietly evoke the gritty realism of daily life for working class America during the second half of the twentieth century.
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Using an aggressive style of approach in which he closes in on strangers with a camera and flash, taking the picture before they’re even aware of being photographed, Cohen’s work is at once deeply unsentimental yet empathetic, highly stylish yet never stylized, and confrontational yet without conflict. Things are as they are in a Cohen photograph, for better or for worse, just like life itself.
Flashed Boy in Blue Jacket with Six Shooter
Cohen’s ability to capture moments, gestures, and emotions that disappear as quickly as they arise puts one in mind of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s monograph, The Decisive Moment (1952), a major influence on the artist as a young man. His gift for precise and original visual ordering set Cohen apart, earning him early recognition with a one-person show at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973 when he was just thirty years old. In the intervening decades, Cohen continued to shoot, creating a singular and impressive body of work.
Frame: A Retrospective (University of Texas Press) is Cohen’s first career retrospective. Featuring over 250 black-and-white and color photographs, “Frame” features about 100 never-before-published works. The book also includes photographs taken in Spain, Ireland, England, Italy, and Mexico, as well as America, providing a broader look at Cohen’s talent for street photography.
Smoking Woman (Girl), 1971
As curator and art historian Jane Livingston writes in the book’s introduction, “One of Cohen’s trademarks is his use of flash lighting, in both daylight and darkness, which he says began as early as 1972. Other photographers such as Garry Winogrand and Larry Fink have used this technique, but not quite in the way that Cohen does. He sometimes uses flash with inanimate subjects in order to create the quasi-surreal, disorienting, or occasionally lyrical effects he is after. Working with people is a different matter. To add the shock of a strobe flash to the naturally leery reaction of a human subject taken unawares by a camera might seem to undermine the subtle furtiveness that is usually required to keep the picture-making process under control.”
But this is what makes a Cohen photograph unique: the tension between the conflict of the knowing and the unknown echoes the relationship between the conscious and unconscious minds. There is a natural, on-going duality here that reflects our own experience of life. The result appears surreal, only in as much as we become aware of the unconscious revealing itself, creating an immediate sense of intensity around even the most mundane of moments.
Girl and man at Road, 1975
With Cohen’s photographs, we are reminded of how visceral each moment of life can be, whether it’s feeling of gently falling snow on a winter’s day or the smell of a cigarette burning in a young boy’s hand. With this book, Cohen observes the many textures of life and allows us to look take it all in, one frame at a time.
All Photos: © Mark Cohen, courtesy of University of Texas Press.
Miss Rosen is a New York-based writer, curator, and brand strategist. There is nothing she adores so much as photography and books. A small part of her wishes she had a proper library, like in the game of Clue. Then she could blaze and write soliloquies to her in and out of print loves.
