In the course of eight trips to Mexico between 1981 and 2003, the American photographer Mark Cohen traveled to Mexico City, Merida, Oaxaca, and Yucatan. Impressed by a land he calls “surreal,” the artist wanders around with his camera, with no anthropological or social agenda.
Mark Cohen writes: “I took these pictures exactly the same way I did in Wilkes-Barre, my hometown. I simply got caught up in whatever was in front of me, out there, in the street. I was really fascinated by the extreme novelty of this giant city. There’s something surreal in the air over there. A simple cardboard box looks different at night, in Mexico City, either that or it’s what one feels in this marvelous place looking at a cardboard box, and then it gets seamlessly transferred onto film.”
In a matter of a split second, Mark Cohen gets very close to his subjects and captures them on the fly, sometimes dazzled by the artificial light of the flash. His black-and-white photographs, taken at arm’s length and, more often than not, without the viewfinder, glean fragments of gestures, poses, and bodies, and testify to the singularity of his gaze. The images emanate nervous energy and an uncanny quality of the everyday.
The bilingual French/Spanish edition contains a poem by Octavio Paz and a short text by Mark Cohen. An English edition is simultaneously published by University of Texas Press.
Mark Cohen, Mexico
Published by Xavier Barral
€45 / $55
