Mark Cohen: Dark Knees

Mark Cohen (born 1943) is a protagonist of the street photography idiom that dominated American photography in the early 1970s. Dark Knees is a catalogue of Cohen’s photos taken in his hometown over the past 40 years. The images captured by Cohen, who rejects the use of his viewfinder in favor of holding the camera away from his body, constitute a poetical documentation of the small mining town in which he was raised, in blurry night scenes with fragments of torsos and the backs of legs. Cohen says of his style: "I became a surrealist because I kept walking around the same blocks, and I started taking a picture of a guy’s shoe. I didn’t know what I was doing exactly. I was just being led by whatever I would see." Dark Knees includes an essay by the acclaimed photography critic Vince Aletti.