Born in 1943 in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania (US)
Lives and works in Wilkes Barre, Pennsylvania (US)
1973-1975
Black and white photograph, gelatin-silver print
30 x 45 cm chacune
Year of Purchase: 1987
In the spirit of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, the American-born artist Mark Cohen photographs streets and urban places, capturing slices of life and fleeting split seconds. As he walks the city streets in search of a face, a body, a saucy detail or a view, he presents a fragmented world. His world is one of working-class neighbourhoods, particularly in Wilkes Barre, the city where he was born: there is nothing smug or miserabilist in his photos, but rather a hard and yet comic vision which does not try to transcend the corny and the vulgar.
Mark Cohen has nevertheless reinvented the street photo genre by using, at the moment the photo is taken, the dazzle of the stroboscope. The intuitively taken photos have a very short exposure time. The patch of light that surges forth captures the space or the person by surrounding it or him with a raw and violent halo, fixing the subject like an insect or animal being pursued by a cone of light.
The grating world into which he invites us – distorted perspectives, bodies truncated and rendered monumental by their appearance in the foreground, off-screen faces – is at once harshly beautiful and disquieting. The space is not neutral but made raw and highly sexualized by the partial presence of these faceless limbs and these shameless, made-up faces, not showing the slightest reaction to this photographic ‘onslaught’.
Hélène Guenin