‘Sometimes it would get physical’: the photographer who captures humanity at shut quarters – The Artwork Newspaper

“A street photographer is a photographer who works on Fifth Avenue in New York,” states Mark Cohen (born 1943) in Trespass, with greater than a touch of suspicion: “I’m like an alley photographer. I go everywhere to take pictures.” In one sense, that is borne out in Cohen’s distinctive, if surprisingly dislocated, work: abrupt and close-cropped color pictures of individuals, locations and located objects taken—even stolen—at shut quarters, a listing of “ordinary people in ordinary situations”, writes Phillip Prodger, the previous head of pictures at London’s National Portrait Gallery.

At the identical time, the concept that Cohen’s footage take him “everywhere” is deceptive. While he has photographed in Mexico and Europe and, in 1973, produced a hanging sequence of black-and-white pictures of New York City avenue scenes—revealed for the primary time in 2025 by GOST Books—the lion’s share of Cohen’s pictures happen in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, the place he lived and labored for 70 years earlier than relocating to Philadelphia in 2014. As a beneficiant choice of Cohen’s Wilkes-Barre pictures, largely taken within the Seventies and Eighties, Trespass presents an thrilling introduction to the work of certainly one of America’s most groundbreaking and rule-breaking photographers, one whose work, to borrow a line from the poet John Ashbery, showcases “the richness of life and time as they happen to us”.

Space invader

Beginning his profession as a neighborhood studio photographer, Cohen quickly developed a particular visible vocabulary. Experimenting with flash and early color movie speeds, he started to {photograph} round Wilkes-Barre utilizing a controversial technique, bringing his digital camera uncomfortably near his topics, invading their private area with neither warning nor consent. For essentially the most half “Cohen worked so fast that he was often able to make pictures before the subject even knew they were being photographed”, writes Prodger, recalling the surreptitious Subway Portraits by Walker Evans (1903-75), taken with a digital camera hidden beneath his coat.

Cohen’s methodology didn’t go unchallenged. “Did your subjects ever complain?” asks Prodger in an interview included right here. “Oh yeah, lots of times. I had all kinds of altercations,” admits Cohen. “Sometimes it would get physical.” And but, Cohen sees a sure irony on this grievance. After all, “you can’t walk down the street without being photographed… There are cameras everywhere you look.”

Blur and focus

Whatever one concludes of Cohen’s guerilla ways, the outcomes communicate for themselves. Simultaneously haunting and brimming with life, the pictures are characterised by excessive blurriness and factors of hyperfocus. There is a molten high quality to Cohen’s footage, as if the world that they depict has but to totally solidify, but the place sudden particulars, arrested by the digital camera flash, are frozen into sharp moments of readability—a vibrant pink fingernail, the glint of a hoop, the buttons on a winter coat.

The competing blur and focus of the work evoke the haziness of reminiscence, resembling the fuzzy, grainy footage of VHS films paused throughout playback. The pictures invite us to think about their unfolding narratives, as if there’s extra of the story to come back. In the phrases of Gene Thornton, reviewing an exhibition of Cohen’s work in 1973, “Time and again I had the impression that… Cohen is showing us only a fraction of what he has seen.” Indeed, one of many rising themes of Trespass is that of partiality, a high quality of incompleteness that accompanies every image. This just isn’t a lot an instance of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s “decisive moment” as it’s a reminder that have is made up of an limitless chain of arbitrary ones; a way that “all things flow and change”, to cite D.H. Lawrence, “and even change is not absolute.”

Off-guard

Due to the pace of Cohen’s apply, his pictures usually seem at awkward angles, heads and limbs cropped oddly from the body, figures usually “slack-jawed or mid-blink”, writes Prodger, seeming by some means extra actual than if they’d had a chance to pose—that’s, compose themselves—for the digital camera. As such, Cohen’s unintentional portraits are particularly poignant, revealing figures misplaced in thought or caught barely off-guard. While his “sitters” (as Prodger phrases them) are strangers, Cohen’s footage obtain surprisingly intimate outcomes, significantly his pictures of youngsters, who seem much less cautious, relating to him with curiosity or amusement, just like the lady with twig-like limbs wielding a baseball bat—a wierd extension of her physique—or the younger boy with a toy revolver, taking pictures the photographer proper again.

“Cohen’s photographs can have a transgressive, even at times erotic, quality,” writes Prodger. Indeed, it’s hanging to seek out that a number of pictures embrace the phrase “flashed” of their titles, a time period with connotations that stretch past images. The transgressive nature of their creation however, the subtlety and pathos of Cohen’s work is simple, whether or not his {photograph} of naked toes resting on a plastic porch—a masterclass in artwork’s relationship with texture—or the blue boy providing a single, good blackberry, his cautious fingers flippantly stained.

• Mark Cohen: Trespass, by Phillip Prodger. Published 7 October 2025 by Prestel, 188pp, 120 color illustrations, £40/$55 (hb)