\u201cA street photographer is a photographer who works on Fifth Avenue in New York,\u201d states Mark Cohen (born 1943) in Trespass, with more than a hint of suspicion: \u201cI\u2019m like an alley photographer. I go everywhere to take pictures.\u201d In one sense, this is borne out in Cohen\u2019s unique, if strangely dislocated, work: abrupt and close-cropped colour shots of people, places and found objects taken\u2014even stolen\u2014at close quarters, a catalogue of \u201cordinary people in ordinary situations\u201d, writes Phillip Prodger, the former head of photographs at London\u2019s National Portrait Gallery.<\/p>\n
At the same time, the idea that Cohen\u2019s pictures take him \u201ceverywhere\u201d is misleading. While he has photographed in Mexico and Europe and, in 1973, produced a striking series of black-and-white images of New York City street scenes\u2014published for the first time in 2025 by GOST Books\u2014the lion\u2019s share of Cohen\u2019s photographs take place in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he lived and worked for 70 years before relocating to Philadelphia in 2014. As a generous selection of Cohen\u2019s Wilkes-Barre photographs, mostly taken in the 1970s and 1980s, Trespass offers an exciting introduction to the work of one of America\u2019s most groundbreaking and rule-breaking photographers, one whose work, to borrow a line from the poet John Ashbery, showcases \u201cthe richness of life and time as they happen to us\u201d.<\/p>\n
Space invader<\/p>\n
Beginning his career as a local studio photographer, Cohen soon developed a distinctive visual vocabulary. Experimenting with flash and early colour film speeds, he began to photograph around Wilkes-Barre using a controversial method, bringing his camera uncomfortably close to his subjects, invading their personal space with neither warning nor consent. For the most part \u201cCohen worked so fast that he was often able to make pictures before the subject even knew they were being photographed\u201d, writes Prodger, recalling the surreptitious Subway Portraits by Walker Evans (1903-75), taken with a camera hidden underneath his coat.<\/p>\n
Cohen\u2019s methodology did not go unchallenged. \u201cDid your subjects ever complain?\u201d asks Prodger in an interview included here. \u201cOh yeah, lots of times. I had all kinds of altercations,\u201d admits Cohen. \u201cSometimes it would get physical.\u201d And yet, Cohen sees a certain irony in this complaint. After all, \u201cyou can\u2019t walk down the street without being photographed\u2026 There are cameras everywhere you look.\u201d<\/p>\n
Blur and focus<\/p>\n
Whatever one concludes of Cohen\u2019s guerilla tactics, the results speak for themselves. Simultaneously haunting and brimming with life, the photographs are characterised by extreme blurriness and points of hyperfocus. There is a molten quality to Cohen\u2019s pictures, as though the world that they depict has yet to fully solidify, yet where sudden details, arrested by the camera flash, are frozen into sharp moments of clarity\u2014a bright red fingernail, the glint of a ring, the buttons on a winter coat.<\/p>\n
The competing blur and focus of the work evoke the haziness of memory, resembling the fuzzy, grainy footage of VHS movies paused during playback. The photographs invite us to imagine their unfolding narratives, as though there is more of the story to come. In the words of Gene Thornton, reviewing an exhibition of Cohen\u2019s work in 1973, \u201cTime and again I had the impression that\u2026 Cohen is showing us only a fraction of what he has seen.\u201d Indeed, one of the emerging themes of Trespass is that of partiality, a quality of incompleteness that accompanies each picture. This is not so much an example of Henri Cartier-Bresson\u2019s \u201cdecisive moment\u201d as it is a reminder that experience is made up of an endless chain of arbitrary ones; a sense that \u201call things flow and change\u201d, to quote D.H. Lawrence, \u201cand even change is not absolute.\u201d<\/p>\n
Off-guard<\/p>\n
Due to the speed of Cohen\u2019s practice, his photographs often appear at awkward angles, heads and limbs cropped oddly from the frame, figures often \u201cslack-jawed or mid-blink\u201d, writes Prodger, seeming somehow more real than if they had had an opportunity to pose\u2014that is, compose themselves\u2014for the camera. As such, Cohen\u2019s accidental portraits are especially poignant, revealing figures lost in thought or caught slightly off-guard. While his \u201csitters\u201d (as Prodger terms them) are strangers, Cohen\u2019s pictures achieve surprisingly intimate results, particularly his photographs of children, who appear less wary, regarding him with curiosity or amusement, like the girl with twig-like limbs wielding a baseball bat\u2014a strange extension of her body\u2014or the young boy with a toy revolver, shooting the photographer right back.<\/p>\n
\u201cCohen\u2019s photographs can have a transgressive, even at times erotic, quality,\u201d writes Prodger. Indeed, it is striking to find that several photographs include the word \u201cflashed\u201d in their titles, a term with connotations that extend beyond photography. The transgressive nature of their creation notwithstanding, the subtlety and pathos of Cohen\u2019s work is undeniable, whether his photograph of bare feet resting on a plastic porch\u2014a masterclass in art\u2019s relationship with texture\u2014or the blue boy offering a single, perfect blackberry, his cautious fingers lightly stained.<\/p>\n
\u2022 Mark Cohen: Trespass, by Phillip Prodger. Published 7 October 2025 by Prestel, 188pp, 120 colour illustrations, \u00a340\/$55 (hb)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cA street photographer is a photographer who works on Fifth Avenue in New York,\u201d states Mark Cohen (born…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451696,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[76,354,355,2524,353,49,48,356,75,185802,10000,151478],"class_list":{"0":"post-451695","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-arts-and-design","8":"tag-arts","9":"tag-arts-and-design","10":"tag-artsanddesign","11":"tag-book-review","12":"tag-books","13":"tag-ca","14":"tag-canada","15":"tag-design","16":"tag-entertainment","17":"tag-mark-cohen","18":"tag-photography","19":"tag-post-war"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451695","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451695"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451695\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451695"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451695"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451695"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}