"When you're trying to make a new object, you've got to make something happen. And you learn to read people's reactions quickly." - Mark Cohen
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. A self-taught photographer since 1958, Mark Cohen’s self-titled“grab shots” came to the attention of the photography world in1973 when he had a solo-show at the Museum of Modern Art, NewYork. Working as a commercial photographer to supplement his work as an artist, Cohen has also taught photography at Princeton University, Wilkes College and Kings College.
Writes Vince Aletti inThe Village Voice, “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.”
Cohen still lives and works in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.
Selected Collections:
Whitney Museum of American Art, NY
Museum of Modern Art, NY
Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
Fogg Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA