His name is Mark Cohen. He is an amazing character and photographer.
Every 10 years, he returns and leaves shortly after.
He sent us these images and this text.
JJN
I keep making pictures, black and white, 35mm, looking, and walking around. I like to take pictures.
I don’t have a theory. Each good negative is a surprise. In time a series of this new work will form and I’ll try to exhibit the prints; some psychological pressure will evolve there, like a new chapter in an abstract novel. Like the color film chapter.
Above is a sentence about today. I think it’s accurate. I had no theory in 1970 and I still don’t.
I think pictures are made with a camera in the street – but at the opening of my show at Le Bal a guy came up and told me I made really good prints – and that was in Paris !
An exhibit of new work — 1973-2022 — is hard to arrange. And I want a catalog for it. So any gallery needs to see that the new picture show is only an “success du esteem” even if they “see” this work. And then there is the shallow auction record. Nothing validates art like money. So the pictures are in the darkroom here and the small set of them in NYC are too odd to be remarkable to collectors. Or curators – and I can’t see sending out scans because the whole digital ‘revolution’ degrades every scan that is not first seen as a print.
An exhibit of thirty of these new pictures would be perfect but with few sales. [Low Ideas] is its name, the prints for it keep piling up and that is ok because they are made from those surprising negatives and put in boxes right here as if I am working in a closed loop in 1950 in the dark Carpathians.
Mark Cohen
