Mark Cohen - Grim Street

It’s Grim Up North

By day, Mark Cohen shoots catalogues, portraits and children at his studio in Wilkes Barre, a Pennsylvanian mining town 3 hours drive from New York City. At dusk, he transforms into a predatory street photographer, his flash and Leica ready to catch the people of Wilkes Barre unaware.

His most famous pictures - his girl blowing bubble gum for example - became iconic images that earned Cohen a series of shows both in New York and overseas (including New York’s MoMa in 1973 and the Photographers’ Gallery in 1981). Now his work is published in Grim Street, an outstanding collection of Cohen’s skewed perspectives of Wilkes Barre from the 1960s to the present day.

Inspired by Cartier Bresson, Cohen started to photograph in the 1960s. Leica in hand, he went out to capture his own Decisive Moments on the humble streets of his home town.

The influence of Cartier Bresson is evident in the first few pages of Grim Street. But as the book progresses, his work becomes harsher as Cohen develops his no-questions asked, in-your-face technique. “I’d shoot and walk away quick - I’d never talk to the people. To people who were watching what I was doing it looked like inappropriate behaviour,” says Cohen. All over the city, it seems there are people trying to avoid Cohen’s lens as he pokes it into their faces. On the streets, in their cars and even on their own doorsteps, people throw their hands up in defence at Cohen’s snap-and-grab photographic style.

There are more faceless pictures with Cohen’s decapitation shots - heads cropped out of the picture. They start with the first image in the book, of a headless horseman, another of Cohen’s iconic images. More follow: a girl in a sailor dress holding an ice-lolly or the woman in her white ribbed shirt, her hand half raised in apparent defence.

“A lot of the pictures are headless because I didn’t want to identify the people and need a release,” says Cohen, “but the reason is more often because it’s less of a violation to take a picture of people’s knees than their face.”

Cohen laces the anonymity of his subjects with hints of detail - a wisp of hair or cotton-clad breasts. He lingers on the clothes his subjects wear showing the textures and patterns of their dresses and coats and the rips and tears they have suffered.

The key element in Cohen’s photography is his radical use of flash. “At first I used a tiny little flash that would only work up to 5 feet so I’d move closer and closer and people would hide,” he says. “The flash makes this zone of 1-2 feet I could work very quickly in. With a wide-angle lens, I didn’t have to think about focus or aperture. I would hold the camera in one hand, the flash in the other without looking through the viewfinder and then bang - the flash would give lots of detail in the foreground and all this ambient light and the buildings in the background, especially around dusk.”

Cohen’s Jump Rope picture is a prime example of this. A girl skips in the middle of a Wilkes Barre street - a tree, fence, house and car stand almost obscured in the background as the headless girl jumps, the detail on her high-necked patterned dress standing out above her grubby socks and skinny legs.

Skinny legs and torsos are a theme running throughout the book. Bare-chested boys appear again and again, their bellies streaked with dirt and grime and popsicle stains. Some flex their muscles, others hold props and some, like the boys tying the puppy to a tree, betray the cruel realities of young boys and the games they play.

The people of Wilkes Barre didn’t always appreciate being flashed from close up by the hermetic Cohen, or having their children snapped as they played. People could get hostile, as shown in Cohen’s Fearful Mom - a picture of a woman staring direct into his camera, her gaze probing and questioning both Cohen and his camera.

“The antagonism got worse as time went by,” says Cohen. “It looked like I was up to some suspicious activity - they’d say why are you taking pictures. People would call the police - if that happened I could give an explanation. But people who didn’t call the police were worse. Because I had no explanation or credentials, people would demand an explanation and ask me why I was taking a picture of their house, their yard, their wife.”

“Sometimes people would take my licence plate number and find out where I lived,” says Cohen. “People like William Klein who worked in big crowds in New York were relatively anonymous, but in small towns like Wilkes Barre, taking pictures looks suspicious to some people - especially since 9/11.” So much so that every time Cohen took a picture, “...there would be an altercation, I now use a 50 mm - I had to back away.”

The lens may have changed over the years, but the format hasn’t. “I like regular 35 mm street photography. Things happen with 35 mm that don’t happen with other formats. It’s fast and it deals with chance. I’ve tried 5x4, Hasselblads, the lot, but they just don’t work for me.”

“The fist in the face shot is an example. The man was in a moving car and I used a 28 mm, my favourite lens, set at f22 at 1/1000 sec. I had no idea at the time that I had made that. I work with chance and sometimes I get lucky, but I don’t know what I’m going to get until I get to the darkroom.”

Cohen continues to make new work on the streets of Wilkes Barre, and is looking to exhibit his work in the UK and Europe, though he admits he is not sure who the audience for his work is, or what it is about.

“I showed in galleries and sold my work, but they aren’t necessarily the kind of pictures you want hanging on your living room wall. A collector bought the headless horseman picture and took it home. He brought it back the next day - his wife found it too frightening. The pictures I make are private and difficult pictures. They aren’t seascapes.”

That’s for sure - Cohen’s photographs show fear, mistrust and Cohen’s own invasions into otherwise private worlds. They are invasive yet at the same time they have an energy and (albeit very strange) beauty that goes beyond the merely intrusive.

“They are a long series of pictures that are very unconsciously driven. They are more psychological than anything else,” he says. “They are also autobiographical in some ways. My work is about fear and approaching this fear and a lot of it may be to do with my own way of thinking. Maybe that’s why some of the pictures work. There’s something I do that I don’t even understand now - that’s why they have this mystery.”