An equally adept practitioner of painting, music and the cinema, the multidisciplinary artist John Cohen, 79, is also a photography fanatic. His earliest images, inspired by the things he saw while walking the streets of New Haven, date from the mid-1950s.
“I had a choice between spending my life in a studio or spending it outdoors,” remembers the photographer John Cohen. As an art student at Yale, he focused on painting, but took classes with Herbert Matter, a pioneer of photomontage. Cohen started taking pictures around the university within “two blocks” . “In the 50s, this rundown neighborhood was a mix of black, Jewish, gypsy and Russian communities. I was intrigued and wanted to do something different from my work at Yale.” He found this difference in the city’s social conditions and the “visual accessibility” that they offered. The atmosphere was authentic, and the culture, too, the air saturated with the sounds of popular music.
Cohen is also a musician, but he visited the gospel choirs of Harlem as a photographer. Following Herbert Matter during the filming of a documentary , he started a long work of tightly framed shots focusing on emotions . “Today photography is very cold, at the time I wanted mine to be very warm.” In the photographs on display at the L. Parker Stephenson Gallery in New York, we see shots of boxers and boxing rings, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsburg, Bob Dylan and the Beat Generation. Cohen sees these first steps as an extension of his work in the studio: “My painter’s sensibility applied to the streets.”
Jonas Cuénin
John Cohen, Early Work: 1954-1957
Through March 17
L. Parker Stephenson Gallery
764 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10065
T: 1 212 517 8700
