Mark Cohen

• Super Labo 2021
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Near fine

"The first picture, gas station through the car window, starts the trip off.I drove eight days, in July,1991, from Atlanta, Georgia to Memphis, Tennessee along small roads, and stopped along the way. When I got to the cities, like Jackson or Birmingham, or Montgomery, I stopped at parking meters and walked around blocks. My intention was not to make a book---only pictures.

After thirty years, and the exposure of extreme political incompetence with the recent past governments, I looked at this work again and thought it might be an accidental view of the South in three parts: Black people, white people, and the infrastructure at the time. Cotton was an early, fundamental, economic driver, with profit enhanced and insured by slaves. Cotton is a picture book, but with a political and social backstory. I stopped at a small black church and used two pictures to emphasize the hold of religion and strong women.Instead of square miles of cotton fields I saw its trace in small cardboard boxes.

The book’s last picture of the five boys on the bench seems emblematic of the region’s resulting, and often segregated leisure. The camera made an unconscious litmus test with black and white film exposed to the acid nature of racism."

_ Mark Cohen

Final copies with very faint surface wear/marking to cover.

• Powerhouse 2005
• Hardback, 1st edition
• Good- see below

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.

Used copy with wear, fading and small tear to dustjacket.  Page edges yellowed with age as expected.  Overall good to very good copy of this rare book.