Tall Socks

New York in the 1970s was notorious for high crime rates, social disorder, an unsafe subway and a declining quality of life. Economic stagnation had hit the city hard and many of the middle-class residents had left for the suburbs. This is often evidenced in Cohen’s photographs in the graffiti, litter and ruin present on the streets but his images also depict a New York which is full of life and on the move. Although the book’s sequencing follows no formal narrative, the pace of the images give the impression of walking around a city whose residents are in a perpetual state of transit with Cohen moving unobtrusively through this. There is change from block to block, from step to step, and details and impressions are observed. There is an undercurrent of threat in some of the images—the glare of a stranger and menacing subway stations—but also humour and joy found in a child’s tall socks, a lady with peacock feathers, an incongruous elephant or a girl carrying a plank of wood across a cobblestoned street.

Mark Cohen has been taking pictures since he was 14 and is best-known for his work made in his native city of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvannia where he would just go out of his door and start to work. He didn’t need to travel because there was an infinite set of possibilities and variations on the streets each day. The same working method applied to his short time in New York. He just had to walk.

Cohen has a singular photographic style resulting from holding his camera at hip level to intuitively photograph, often up close to his subjects. This lends his images an unusual perspective—they show the world viewed from the height of a child, focusing on objects or angles which are often overlooked, cropping figures and peering curiously into doorways and down streets. The familiar becomes both fresh and strange.