You’ll have to forgive this slight digression. This week’s Zineland focuses on a photo book with a more conventional format.
But Mark Cohen’s Dark Knees is a digression in itself. The photographer is one of the great walkers, like Robert Adams and William Eggleston. Every day he roams the same anonymous American suburbs.
In these photographs, the streets of Wilkes-Barre, a small Pennsylvania town, take on the appearance of a mad carnival. By holding his camera at arm’s length, hardly every framing the face and using a flash in daylight, Cohen plunges the viewer into the anguish of imbalance and the silent menace of everyday insurrection.
How can we believe for more than a few seconds in the innocence of this playing card fallen on the tarmac? There has to be a soul in these inanimate objects. Mark Cohen never looks into the eyes of his living subject. He makes an inventory of his shots (“Boy’s Hand with Ant,” “Two Girls in Dresses,” “Dark Knees,” “Curtain,” “Finger and Bust”) like an alien gathering information on the infra-ordinary eccentricities of the planet Middle Class
One of the virtues of this magnificent book by Xavier Barral is to have accentuated the imbalance of Cohen’s photographs by printing them horizontally, as if the images themselves refused to be presented in a conventional, linear narrative. The work is much more than a complement to the wonderful recent exhibition at Le Bal in Paris of this same body of work.
BOOK
Dark Knees, Mark Cohen
Publisher: Xavier Barral
46 euros
170 x 240 mm
188 pages
