Mark Cohen first came to the attention of the photography world in 1973
with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This
iconic show proved to the art world that Cohen was the heir apparent to
the explosive street photography of the 60s. Now, after more than thirty
years, Cohen’s complex and influential body of work is presented for
the first time in Grim Street, an astonishing collection of Americana as original and effective as the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, or Weegee.
Cohen’s photography confronts the viewer with a startling beauty,
rapidly shifting from rough and confrontational to quiet, respectful,
and serene. In Grim Street, filled with what Cohen calls
“grab shots,” you can easily imagine the photographer guilefully
patrolling the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mine-town he
calls home. His camera, often prefocused and shot from the hip, scrolls
around its subjects searching for tidbits of delectable detail. Then
suddenly thrusting out towards its subjects, a strobe bursts, capturing a
violently cropped spot of stockinged legs creeping around a corner, or a
woman’s bared teeth and stretched lips. In these images emerges a
cluttered world of visceral, sexualized encounters with the human body.
The photographs are equally fascinating for the inconsistent reaction
of their subjects. In one shot, a group of young girls hide their faces
with their coats and cower against a brick wall, desperately searching
for any protection from Cohen’s camera. Another shot brandishes a dapper
young man, hair greased and comb quickly pulled out for the glamour
shot. But just when you think that you can’t see the photographs for all
the noise, Cohen’s camera stands back in meditation, displaying
sensitive compositions of the gardens of Wilkes-Barre and the small
town’s residents engaging in their daily comforts. One of the more
complex bodies of street photography around, Cohen’s work will open your
eyes as wide as they can go and keep you flipping the pages for years
to come.
“Cohen’s black-and-white photos…are deliberately
disconcerting, almost vulgar….Heads are cropped out of the frame;
truncated hands, legs, and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective
warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America,
but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly
unique, and much imitated.” —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice
A second book, True Color, followed in 2007. Rich with the subtle colors of the seventies, True Color
is a tour through Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mining town Cohen calls
home, from the vantage of this unique artist. Originally an experiment
in the difference between color and black-and-white photography, the
pictures included in True Color, commissioned by the
George Eastman House, became a project of their own. Cohen captures
faces and actions from the ordinary to the bizarre, documenting life as
it was lived on the streets on Wilkes-Barre. These photographs are an
astonishing collection of Americana, and a complex testament to the
vision of one of the era’s most intense and successful photographers.
Vince Aletti relates in his essay in True Color that
Cohen had several visits from police and an irate husband. People’s
increasing suspicions and changes in society meant that over the years,
Cohen gradually took a few steps back from his subjects, he explains “I
got farther and farther away. I started with a twenty-one millimeter
lens, then I moved to a twenty-eight, then a thirty-five, and now I’m
using a 50.”
Check an interesting video about Mark Cohen starting from 1'40''
in-sight is a 38 minute documentary film made by the British Street Photographer Nick Turpin that follows some of the members of the in-public Street Photographers group shooting on the streets of London, New York, Melbourne and Rotterdam. Using miniature HD camera technology to place the viewer on the Hotshoe, the film provides an in sight into the working methods and approach of some of the worlds most notable contemporary Street Photographers.
You can enjoy this great film with a small donation to paypal supporting this effort. My recommendation is that is worth every cent you give. Just push the play button bellow and watch some of the greatest street photographers in action.
Recenlty I took part in a workshop led by Michael Ackerman in Athens. This was a very rewarding experience meeting a photographer with so interesting work and strong point of view. As a person I think is genuine, pretty much a true artist, isolated to himshelf who prefer communicating with his photo's than with words. As he told us, this was one of the very first reasons to attract him in photography since was a student.
He is an American. Born in 1967 in Tel Aviv. Lives in Berlin.Since his first exhibition, in 1999, Michael Ackerman has made his mark by bringing a new, radical and unique approach. His work on Varanasi, entitled "End Time City," breaks away from all sorts of exoticism or any anecdotal attempt at description, to question time and death with a freedom granted by a distance from the panoramic – whose usage he renewed – to squares or rectangles.
Michael Ackerman is an artist of our time, a tragic time, a time which prohibited movement to trace the boundaries between present and future, between the snapshot and the memory.
A photographer with strong obsessions. I will tell you a story about one of his photos. There was a guy called Christian, Michael felt that would be very interesting to take some shots of him. He was taking photo's of him 3-4 times in a period of 6-8 months. He was kept asking him every time to had his head shaved. Once, Christian told him that he really didn't want to do it again because his girlfriend wanted him with hair :-)
So I asked Michael, why after all this trouble to have him shaved his head so many times, you choose finally in your book a photo of him with his head cut in the frame? The answer was that I just felt that this photo was the right one! Here is the photo ...
Portraits from men faces who met mostly in bars, very strong, self-destructive, naked and vulnerable at the same time. Most of then taken with polaroids. This way he could show them what is doing and make them feel more comfortable.
Michael Ackerman looks for - and finds - in the world that he crosses the correspondences to his personal illness, to his permanent doubts, to his own fears. He admits it, discreetly, by regularly taking self-portraits, which are not narcissistic, but which say that he knows how to belong to this universe which goes badly.
Every picture is a surprise for him. None of them was preimagined. In every picture there is always an accident involved. There is always something there that wasn't seen during the shot.
A dark world with desperate characters as ghostly as the buildings enclosing the deserted streets, trains stranded in the snow in Poland. Michael Ackerman continues to build a work at once expressionistic and restraint in which he does not deny the autobiographical elements, but refrain from any narcissism.
His photographs, fleeing the constraints of traditional reporting, blur geographical boundaries and define a space, without any narration, is a pure mental creation. Served by light surreal, deep blacks and a broken grain, photographs express mixed feelings of tenderness, love, of loneliness and anxiety and reveal something
of psychic functioning of the artist, its affects and obsessions. These black images are disturbing, surreal like a Murnau film, do feel the tragedy of humanity.
The equipment he use is a Holga, a Diana and a Leica M. but after talking with him would not be a surprise for me if the next work we will see from him will be in color and maybe digital.
Klavdij Sluban is a French photographer of Slovenian origin based in Paris. He was born in 1963 and now in age of 48, he continues the development of his rigorous and coherent body of work. Sluban learnt the subtleties of black & white printing under the guidance of Georges Fèvre. Although he held a Masters' degree in Anglo-American literature, little by little, he gave up teaching to commit wholly to photography.
Never inspired by immediate and sensational current affairs, Sluban's numerous photography trips are permeated with literary references for example, Beckett, Milton. The Black Sea, the Caribbean, the Balkans, and Russia can be read as many successive steps of an in-depth study of a patient proximity to the encountered real. His deep blacks and backlit silhouettes convey to his photographic style uprightness and accuracy free of didacticism or exoticism. In 1997, his work Balkans Transits, which he published with François Maspero, was awarded the RFI (International French Radio) prize.
In 1995, Klavdij Sluban created a photography workshop for teenagers in the Juvenile Detention Centre in Fleury-Mérogis (South of Paris, the biggest jail in Europe). The Adolescents were taught a creative approach, development and printing in photography. Their work is regularly shown inside the jail. Photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson attended several times a year from the beginning of the project, as did photographers William Klein and Marc Riboud who also attended to encourage the participating adolescents.
Τhis commitment was pursued in the disciplinary camps and prisons of Eastern Europe - Ukraine, Georgia, Moldavia, and Latvia and in the disciplinary centres of Moscow and St Petersburg. By offering us pictures of those places he is familiar with and of their inhabitants to whom he is a true partner, Sluban unveils the problems of closed spaces and constrained horizons. And by doing so, he brings to both our consciousness and senses the fractures of a confinement enhanced by the internalization of perceptions.
Klavdij Sluban is a traveller for whom high seasons and travel commerce mean little. From countries generally considered unvisitable, too poor, too sad and grey, he brings back a harvest of pictures, always in black and white. The basis of his photography is time and people - people he would not dream of staring at. For Sluban is no paparazzo of reality, he is a photographer on a human scale, aware of the shifting frontiers of a profession which allows so many different interpretations, including the most idiotic ones.
His new book "East to East" brings together photographs that he has made during extensive travels in the East, frequently following the route of the Trans-Siberian Railway. Sluban's use of deep blacks and backlit silhouettes embues his work with a highly individual photographic style. These powerful images are remarkably moody and atmospheric and permeated with a strange melancholy and an overwhelming sense of isolation. This is deeply memorable work.
This explains the way he constantly calls his work into question, often remaining silent for long periods as if he suddenly doubts his strength at the threshold of his own eye. This inner silence, which is at the origin of all his pictures, is in fact his most precious asset. He brings before our gaze those who, in Haiti, in Cuba or in the republics around the Black Sea, stubbornly exist far from our well-worn clichés of social success.
But it would be useless to see these pictures as appeals for witnesses. In the East as in the West, Sluban works alone, a free spirit, with no commitments other than those he imposes on himself, and expecting nothing in return.
His tools are a good pair of shoes, a black box, and his Leica. In his pocket, a book and his faithful compass.
From the interview with Brigitte Ollier (in "Klavdij Sluban, Transverses", published by Editions Paris Audioviuel/MEP).
A simple question : What's the Black Sea like ?
Really black! It's the poor relation of the Méditerranean, which is luxuriant, flamboyant, bluer than blue. In autumn and winter there's an atmosphere of desolation which probably continues in the warm seasons. In winter the greys are really striking, everything is interiorized, everyone hibernates within his own thoughts. Everything is the opposite of demonstrative, but it's not empty. Intensity is never where you'd expect to find it.
The Black Sea borders seven countries, from Turkey to Bulgaria. Did one of them have a particular impact on you ?
No, I have no preference. Of course I have a soft spot for the self-proclaimed republic of Gagauzia, in Moldavia. And I'm also fond of the self-proclaimed independent republic of Transdniestria, even if it's not such a nice place to live.
Is it hard to come back to Paris after this kind of trip ?
I only allow myself to drift during a trip because I know I'll be coming back home afterwards. I'm aware of the limits of this, but I need to work within such a frame.; otherwise I'd probably never accomplish anything. Even for my trips to prisons, I proceed in the same way: I stay three weeks inside.
Three weeks for the trip - how long does it take you to prepare ?
I usually know a long time in advance that I'll be leaving. It starts with an attraction for a country, and in this waiting period I often meet someone who has already been there. The way I perceive things comes from what I read, written texts that help me feel things from the inside. When I get to the country, I feel ready in my own way. Leaving itself is one of the worst forms of torture ever invented. I fight against it, but when I'm on a trip, I'm so completely involved that I sometimes realise almost by accident that I've got to go back home. When this happens I'm like a diver coming up to the surface in stages. Then I'm quite happy to come home and I stay in Paris long enough for the next trip to take shape
When you get back do you grab your contact prints to check the "results"? Or do you calmly wait for the next stage ?
I'm not impatient, I wait. On the other hand I love getting back from Moldavia for example and looking at the year-old contact sheets from Haiti. This way of distancing myself from experience is essential for making the right choices, and it can only happen with time. As there are failures, my trips in preparation allow me to make more incisive choices. There are boxes for the first selection, boxes for the second and boxes for the third - like divisions in football. And it's been known for third-selection pictures to get promoted to first division! All this goes on at night, when I'm alone; I arrange the pictures into groups, always working towards an ideal.
