{"id":70882,"date":"2014-05-07T11:51:38","date_gmt":"2014-05-07T15:51:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=70882"},"modified":"2014-05-08T12:12:08","modified_gmt":"2014-05-08T16:12:08","slug":"a-conversation-about-mark-cohens-dark-knees","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2014\/05\/07\/a-conversation-about-mark-cohens-dark-knees\/","title":{"rendered":"A Conversation About Mark Cohen\u2019s Dark Knees<\/i>"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Bubblegum,<\/a>

Bubblegum<\/i>, 1975; from Dark Knees<\/i> (\u00c9ditions Xavier Barral, 2013) \u00a9 Mark Cohen<\/p><\/div>\n

Dark Knees<\/a> is a 2013 book that accompanies a recent exhibition of Mark Cohen\u2019s photographs from the 1970s, though it feels more like a cryptic archive of fragments\u2014tightly cropped, mostly black and white pictures of parts of the body and objects on the ground. Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he\u2019s lived and worked for the last seven decades.<\/em><\/p>\n

Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford are the founders of J&L Books<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n

Jason Fulford<\/strong>: I saw Cohen\u2019s show at Le Bal. It was funny to see photographs of Pennsylvania in Paris. I\u2019d like to meet him. I saw a video of him shooting on the street in 1982<\/a>. He\u2019s pretty sneaky\u2014getting up really close to somebody and then flashing and moving away fast, no conversation. I think he has a thing for legs and feet.<\/p>\n

Leanne Shapton<\/strong>: Girls, legs, midsections, hands.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: He cites surrealism as an influence. Body parts. I wouldn\u2019t call them portraits. They\u2019re more like pictures of clothes on people.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: I\u2019d like to see that footage of him. Looking at the work, it does feel he\u2019s moving, he sneaking, he\u2019s snatching, and it\u2019s almost like he\u2019s looking out of the corners of his eyes. You don\u2019t feel the fixed point with him\u2014you feel it\u2019s sidelong, that he doesn\u2019t want to engage directly.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I kind of wish I hadn\u2019t seen the video. Have you ever seen footage of Daido Moriyama photographing in Tokyo<\/a>? He uses a point-and-shoot camera and he\u2019s very casual about it. His arms are hanging down straight with a camera in one hand. He moves through the city like a shark, slowly and methodically, in and out of stores, in and out of malls and alleyways, up and down escalators and stairwells, and his instincts seem honed to know when to shoot from the hip and when he can stop and compose. But he never gets that close to people.
\nCohen shoots with a wide-angle lens, so when he\u2019s got a close up of a face he\u2019s really only a few inches away. Also, it was a different time\u2014people related to cameras differently. In high school, in the eighties, I used to go to the airport and take pictures of people. You can\u2019t do that so easily now. Security won\u2019t let you, people won\u2019t let you. That\u2019s the striking thing about the video of Cohen shooting\u2014people hardly react to him. <\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: Do you think these pictures were edited by him then\u2014in the seventies\u2014or now? The feeling I get just turning the pages is that it\u2019s speaking to what we\u2019d appreciate now\u2014not the feeling that I get from, say, those Lee Friedlander books that were shot and published in the seventies and eighties, which feel \u201cof the time.\u201d Always kind of a funny tension when you find old work. Makes me think of Vivian Meier\u2019s stuff\u2014what work she felt was her best and what we think is her best. It makes me want to say to photographers, Publish work now<\/em>. Don\u2019t wait till you can edit it in retrospect years later.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: Cohen would shoot in the day, come home and develop the negatives, make dinner, and then edit the work. He says he\u2019s never gone back to the images he initially rejected. But they\u2019re all sitting there still, in his archive. I\u2019d guess that Diane Dufor, the curator at Le Bal, edited this work with Cohen for the Paris show and for the book. The pictures are titled with simple words or phrases. Sometimes they\u2019re obvious\u2014Three Bare Feet<\/em>\u2014but then sometimes they make you reconsider the picture\u2014Boy Stands in Front<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\"Dark<\/a><\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: And they\u2019re handwritten, the titles. I have such an uneasy relationship with hand lettering, considering I do it so much myself. It can look annoyingly na\u00efve, as if you want to send a message of authenticity or childlike wonder. But here\u2014I don\u2019t know why\u2014it works. Maybe because of his age.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I love old-man handwriting. I can\u2019t wait. I\u2019m going to write a lot of letters when I get old. In the exhibition, the walls were painted red and the images were in small frames\u00a0all in a line across the room. He hand-wrote the titles beneath them, directly onto the wall, with a light blue grease pencil. It was beautiful.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: Lets talk about the book as an object. What do you think of the title, Dark Knees<\/em>? It\u2019s a title from one of the pictures.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I like it. A lot of his photo titles could have been used as book titles\u2014Food Particle Alpha<\/em>, Cell Phone and Shirt Out<\/em>, Crack Glass<\/em>, Meat and Hook<\/em>, Plane of Snow<\/em>, Parallel Arms<\/em>, Cartwheel Bellybutton<\/em>, White Tire<\/em>, Improvised Beach<\/em>.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: There\u2019s something about it being a vertical format book with horizontal images that makes you take it in with more movement. An up-and-down read does something different than a left-to-right, because I think you do take both pictures in at once. We\u2019re so used to reading left-to-right, where we can isolate a page in our head, and thus our vision, pretty easily. But this way it feels like a scroll. I\u2019m still jarred by it\u2014it\u2019s more the way a filmstrip works.<\/p>\n

\"COUV_DARK<\/a><\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: You were making a book once, and we were talking about not wanting people to flip through it so quickly, so you requested a deckled edge, which makes it impossible to flip through because you only get chunks of pages. This format does a similar thing\u2014you can\u2019t flip through it. I love this book. I think it\u2019s one of my favorite books of 2013. I wonder if I feel some northeast Pennsylvania kinship with him\u2014I have a connection to Scranton.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: Where do you think Cohen falls in the seventies \u201csocial landscape\u201d scene\u2014in the Winogrand, Friedlander, Arbus group?<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I think he stands apart from that group, literally because of his geographical isolation but also because of his tight cropping of things. Feet and legs. I read a book recently about the Black Dahlia murder and how the surrealists were way into it, following it in the news. And then they all made art using women\u2019s body parts. Hans Bellmer and Man Ray and Dal\u00ed and Duchamp. It was creepy. That particular murder had a huge impact on the visual art of the time. I was looking for the influence of surrealism in Cohen\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: I see more Magritte\u2014the face obscured, the idea of air and space and sky, melons and apples, you know? Large things looming.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: The object taken out of context, mysterious.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: Yes, isolated. I\u2019m not a huge fan of surrealism\u2014I like fur-lined teacups and Man Ray, but, ugh, women\u2019s body parts. It just feels like that stage in art school when you photograph mannequins.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I think there\u2019s something more sinister to it.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: Yeah. Body parts can seem very \u201cEroticism 101\u201d\u2014and violent, too\u2014but I don\u2019t get much violence in Cohen\u2019s work. He\u2019s more a peeping tom.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: I get the sense that he takes pleasure in seeing what something will look like as a photograph. I think it was Winogrand who said he just wanted to see what something would look like photographed. But with Cohen, using a flash and flattening surfaces is sometimes not about capturing what\u2019s actually happening there. It\u2019s about turning it into something else, a flattened thing.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: That\u2019s such a modern state of being, knowing and understanding and wanting to see something as a photograph. That\u2019s the story of the last century. It\u2019s how we look at the world now by default.<\/p>\n

\"Girl<\/a>

Girl Holding Blackberries<\/i>, June 2008; from Dark Knees<\/i> (E\u0301ditions Xavier Barral, 2013) \u00a9 Mark Cohen<\/p><\/div>\n

JF<\/strong>: I just watched a documentary about Michelangelo Antonioni. They interviewed a lot of people who loved him, and one was Alain Robbe-Grillet, who talked about Antonioni in contrast to Hitchcock. When Hitchcock shows you things onscreen, sometimes they\u2019re confusing, but by the end of the film he wraps everything up and it all makes perfect sense. Robbe-Grillet says that Antonioni is the opposite\u2014everything makes sense in the moment, but as the film goes on, it makes less and less sense. The meaning actually opens up rather than closes. He says that modern work opens up meaning.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: I like that definition, but I don\u2019t think it applies to what I was saying. I\u2019m thinking of the moment where we take ourselves out of a situation to photograph it, and then we look immediately at the five frames we\u2019ve taken on our device to find the one that most satisfies us. We already have a preconceived notion of what we\u2019re going to get in the frame.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: Jeff Ladd<\/a> was talking about this recently. He says that when you use a digital camera, you see the results immediately, and stop shooting once you\u2019ve got what you set out for. But when you use film, there\u2019s more uncertainty, so you keep shooting, and often the more interesting pictures are the ones that happen seven or eight frames later\u2014that you never would have gotten to digitally. Cohen used a flash at close range. There\u2019s one picture, Knee<\/em>\u2014he says when he took the picture, he was just shooting a girl\u2019s knee, but in the end the whole composition, the way the shadows and angles line up, make the picture transcend the knee.<\/p>\n

\"Knee,<\/a>

Knee<\/i>, June 1973; from Dark Knees<\/i> (E\u0301ditions Xavier Barral, 2013) \u00a9 Mark Cohen<\/p><\/div>\n

LS<\/strong>: You said you like the idea of him\u2014what do you mean?<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: He stayed in the town where he grew up, and he\u2019ll probably die there. He had a few successes outside, but he went back. I respect that.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: It\u2019s honest and straightforward and in some ways modest. I was just reading about Stephen King, who still lives in Maine. Knowing something so intimately makes for good art\u2014when you\u2019re an observer and an insider.<\/p>\n

JF<\/strong>: Every town should have a Mark Cohen. Someone who sticks around, someone who looks at the town through a surrealist lens.<\/p>\n

LS<\/strong>: The resident insider. It\u2019s a noble calling.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dark Knees is a 2013 book that accompanies a recent exhibition of Mark Cohen\u2019s photographs from the 1970s, though it feels more like a cryptic archive of fragments\u2014tightly cropped, mostly black and white pictures of parts of the body and objects on the ground. Cohen was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he\u2019s lived and worked […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":692,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[13815,13814,2240,13812,1431,10728,13811,100,13813],"class_list":["post-70882","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-alain-robbe-grillet","tag-diane-dufor","tag-jason-fulford","tag-le-bal","tag-leanne-shapton","tag-lee-friedlander","tag-mark-cohen","tag-photography","tag-vivian-meier"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nA Conversation About Mark Cohen\u2019s \u201cDark Knees\u201d<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Leanne Shapton and Jason Fulford discuss Mark Cohen\u2019s recent exhibition of his photographs from the 1970s.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, 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