On the cover of the book published by Éditions Xavier Barral to accompany the exhibition at Agnès b. Gallery, a girl’s calf in embroidered knee-high sock traces a neat diagonal across the image. It is immediately recognizable as the work of Mark Cohen who prefers fragments and details to wider views. “It’s exactly what I would do back home. You can see all the details—the design of the sock, the cut of the skirt, the grain in the pic, this box full of fruits—I always take pictures of boxes—and the grass under her foot,” he enumerates the details while squatting nimbly, despite his 73 years, to mimic the shooting position.
A street photographer—focusing above all on his hometown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania—Mark Cohen presents here images he took in Mexico between 1981 and 2003. “I am not a traveler; 99% of my work is made in Wilkes-Barre and Philadelphia, but a good friend of mine told me, ‘you should try to see Mexico because your work is strange and when you get there you’ll see a lot of pictures that you can take’.”
He is fascinated by the energy and the surrealism of the experience. “I was very excited about it. I shot 25 rolls in 8 days! I had a car and stopped all the time. The only thing I worried about was whether I could park my car. I was going to towns nearby Mexico DF—they were spelled like T A L C A M C X X A, you know, so I went there just because it seemed exotic on the map but I was shooting just as if I was in Wilkes-Barre.”
Indeed, Cohen sticks to his working mode. He moves quickly, using his 28 or 35 millimeter lens and a flash in a way he calls “intrusive,” takes a single shot, and moves on, scanning the ground and the sky for surrealist angles. “Everything is based on a very fixed technique, until the development,” he explains. “First, I have to form my mind to go take pictures. Then I go to a place, I walk around, and I will be into it. I have to make a psychological formation, and then I’ll go for 15 minutes and that’s all. It’s a really short time. I set the F16 or whatever, and I try to find something I’d like to make a picture of.”
He is as curious about objects, such as the chair that seems to have shrunk like Alice in Wonderland, placed next to a crateful of soda bottles just asking to be filled, as he is about people, whom he approaches to the point of brushing past them. The rare pairs of eyes look straight at the camera with a mixture of surprise and approval. “I just take a pic quickly and go down the street. It’s candid.”
The lively, touching reality finds its way into the image as chance that stumbles into view. “There is a visual force that moves around the picture,” Cohen adds. Every image begins with an attraction to a detail—“look at this girl on the sidewalk, and the shape of her hair”—followed by life that crosses the frame like the foot of a hurried passer-by. “This is an accident, that’s why it feels dada. You don’t want to be too sure, you want to add an accident. I don’t know how you can have any fun working with a tripod, it locks everything,” he comments.
Cohen’s ingenuousness could well be another clue to his work which refuses any social or journalistic commitment. “There is a kind of pressure on photographers to go to exotic places to make pictures. But I went around in circles for 60 years in Wilkes-Barre. It’s like Beckett, who focuses on small things—if you do that you naturally develop a psychological overlay on the pictures.”
Laurence Cornet
Laurence Cornet is a journalist specializing in photography and independent exhibition curator. She splits her life between New York and Paris.
Mark Cohen, Mexico
Published by Xavier Barral
€ 45
http://exb.fr/en/home/279-mexico-9782365110.html
http://www.galeriedujour.com/expositions/0302_americas/index.html
