LYNNE COHEN
Canadian
Lynne Cohen is one of contemporary art’s strong-
est practitioners of a vein of photography that
descends from observers of the social landscape
such as Euge`ne Atget and Walker Evans and has
modern-day lineage in the New Topographic
photographers of the 1970s. She photographs inte-
riors with a signature impassive style, subtly under-
lining the dark absurdity of our built environments
and the social forces at work within. Cohen titles
her photographs with broad descriptions of the
type of space in the photograph, elevating the
rooms depicted from specific sites to metaphors
for larger social relations. Cohen’s early work
investigated domestic and accessible communal
spaces, such as living rooms, beauty salons, and
party rooms. Her subject matter has evolved to
primarily include spaces implicated in the regula-
tion and structuring of society and its citizens:
restricted-access communal or institutional spaces
such as men’s clubs, classrooms, laboratories, and
observation rooms. The ominous nature of these
places inflects the more neutral sites included in
her later work, such as halls and spas. While the
idea of architecture and built space embodying
social power structures and codes is commonly
linked to the influential theorist Michel Foucault,
Cohen herself has declared more of an affinity to the
French slapstick writer/director/actor Jacques Tati.
In Cohen’s photographs, social critique is subtle,
served with a healthy side of black humor.
Lynne Cohen was born in 1944 in Racine, Wis-
consin, and she has resided in Canada since 1973.
She studied art at the University of Wisconsin,
Madison, graduating in 1967, with further study at
the University of London’s Slade School of Art. It
was after receiving a Master’s degree in 1969 and
working in sculpture, printmaking, and conceptual
processes that Cohen began making photographs in
- Minimalism and Pop Art were strong early
influences, and Cohen was drawn to interior spaces
as a kind of Duchampian readymade, both banal
and extraordinary. Her mature career interests man-
ifested themselves early on in printmaking projects
that incorporated tracings from mail-order catalogs
of everyday objects and environments. Her long-
lasting fascination with the banal was evident in
the early projectFront and Back, a 1972 16-mm
film created in collaboration with Andrew Lugg
that utilized found postcards of terribly ordinary
places, juxtaposing the images and the actual text
written by anonymous travelers. While Cohen con-
sidered projects such as resituating everyday house-
hold objects and furniture into a gallery setting, she
settled into photography as the most direct medium
for accessing the social and political questions that
interested her.
The desire for directness and precision led Cohen
to work with a large-format view camera, making
both 57 inch negatives and 810 inch negatives.
She continues to work with the 810 inch camera
to this day, a choice that imparts her photographs
with a clarity of detail and depth of focus field that
are greater than possible with the unaided human
eye. This heightening of perception contributes to
the overall project of her photographs: to force a
viewer to notice the strangeness at the core of every-
day spaces and objects. This peculiarity is so pro-
nounced that her work has been mistaken to be
constructed or set up, although Cohen always
photographs real, ‘‘found’’ places and does not
make any significant alterations to the scene before
photographing. Her signature frontal, deadpan,
symmetrical, wide-angle style was developed early
on as a means of achieving the most apparently
neutral view possible, and it has remained remark-
ably constant through to her present work. This style
contributes to the atmosphere of a stage set that
pervades most of her images, a feeling enhanced by
the absence of any people despite the spaces’ evident
functionality. Objects become stand-ins for bodies.
This happens concretely in the paper targets of
human forms found in many of the photographs of
shooting ranges, or the outlines of bodies demon-
strating the proper use of the space inModel Living
Room, 1976. Human interaction is also introduced
more allusively, such as by the trope of two chairs
facing each other standing in for human interaction,
which is found in Recreation Room, 1971, and
Laboratory, 1983.
For most of her career Cohen has elected to not
date her photographs, and although her photo-
graphs can now be found with dates, many ofCOHEN, LYNNE