The Bruce Silverstein Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of early vintage photographs by Mark Cohen. This show is Cohen’s first New York exhibition in 10 years, and serves as a refreshing reminder of the origins of the contemporary photography scene so popular today.
Working out of Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, a small mining town a few hours away from New York City, Mark Cohen burst into the photography scene in 1973 with solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art and at the Light Gallery. Five years later, his now iconic image of a strobe-lit girl blowing a bubble would appear in John Szarkowski’s seminal publication Mirrors and Windows, American Photography Since 1960 as well as the cover on the New York Times Magazine with accompanying article, The New American Photography.
Over the last three decades Cohen’s deeply psychological images, impeccably printed and always uncropped, have explored the gritty yet “sexualized” underbelly of a rural society in decay. Whether the viewer is being led down a dark alley to explore small pieces of bread on the ground, softly focused, and strobe-lit, or through the dark courtyard to glimpse a young boy’s torso covered with an abstraction of grime and sweat, Cohen managed to create a new parallel universe.
While Cohen’s imagery is deeply immersed in traditional street photography, his work transcends the genre to the point of reinvention. By holding the camera in his palm and often releasing the shutter without having looked through the viewfinder, he has created a style that captures moments never seen before in photography, so fleeting that only the final image reveals his intentions. Cohen’s innovative use of strobe light further enhances his ability to capture moments that our eyes cannot perceive: raindrops suddenly become light abstractions, and the teardrop of a baby glows with iridescence. A close-up image of the fingers of a schoolgirl, leaning out the window of a bus, also reveals Cohen’s obsession with the close-up portrait. It is this invasion of personal space, often uninvited and unannounced, that has become synonymous with Cohen’s work.
Mark Cohen’s numerous single-artist exhibitions include those at the Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art. His work is a part of such prestigious collections as the Whitney, the Museum of Modern Art, the Corcoran, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Fogg Museum. Cohen’s awards include a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and two Guggenheim Fellowships.
