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Introduction by Joni Karanka Mark Cohen is the great outsider of street photography. During the 1970’s he developed a unique aesthetic, disconnected from the new street photography coming out of New York and brought to the forefront of the international community by the likes of Garry Winogrand and Joel Meyerowitz. While the New Yorkers were on their personal quest to give an alternative to the street photography dominated by Henri Cartier-Bresson’s often too pleasing and clever decisive moment, Cohen was on his personal revolution against the genre. Where Winogrand had captured the anarchy, rhythm and complexity of the city drawing from the dirtier realism of Robert Frank and William Klein, Mark Cohen’s inspiration seemed to come out of nowhere. A first viewing of his books Grim Street and True Color made me think: how on Earth did I miss this? Grim Street, as the name suggests, is full of grit, graphical and powerful images. The subjects are fragmented and captured from close distance, providing a visual insight that is completely removed from our daily experience. We are not presented with the bustling and crowded pavements of a major city but small dusty streets, barely populated. The gloomy and sometimes innocent mood of the mining town of Wilkes-Barre transpires through the black and white photographs. Cohen is not trying to tell us the story of the town and its people, in what I would often expect from photography from the period, but embarks on a travel through what the world looks like. True Color brings us back to Wilkes-Barre, and first carries on from where Grim Street left us: the hurried glimpses of passers by, the same empty streets, the old buildings. Slowly the book moves to a new, more distant viewpoint, and somehow reality is brought into the photographs. It feels like seeing the Technicolor spill into the Wizard of Oz, but this time is hard to tell where did the dream start. CLICK IMAGES TO ENLARGE |
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An interview with Mark Cohen features in the |