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Lynne Cohen: Come Inside

Toronto: For more than three decades, Lynne Cohen’s genius has been to pause in transitional spaces, think about them, look carefully and take photographs. And not just any photographs, but ones made with a large-format view camera, the tool that most fully exploits the medium’s capacity for deep description. Her new book, Cover, raises the descriptive bar even higher because it’s entirely in colour and the colour amplifies— it’s acrid, acidic, alienating. Cohen gives us a chilling, witty, telling portrait of our civilization, in which everything is temporary and expediency rules. We no longer build in marble or granite for the ages—we throw up thin steel studs and drywall and roll on latex paint for the coming quarter.

We walk through these spaces most days of our lives—on the way to the dentist, our doctor or work. We’re aware that they’re there—bleak, barren, stupid— occupied by symbolic chairs that no one will ever sit on, empty side tables and walls decorated with pictures that are pictures of pictures. We pass through them quickly with our eyes down and our minds full of intending. Our goal is to reach the elevator, the washroom or the exit.

Cohen’s world encompasses more than lobbies, waiting rooms and hallways. It also includes classrooms, training facilities, production spaces and therapeutic installations—or so it would appear. Cohen provides no substantive captions or detailed descriptions of her subjects, and without context all these spaces seem totally insane. While her strategy liberates the images from mere documentation, leaving them free to levitate into art, the viewer can be left wishing to know more, wanting to understand just why these spaces are so.

The photographs in Cohen’s book show her to be a brilliant diagnostician of alienation—one who is sharp-eyed, smart, funny and definitely not a romantic. Her achievement is all the more remarkable given her seemingly unpromising sources and subjects. What could be duller than the professional tradition of interiors photography? What could be more banal and boring than the postcards that have long intrigued and inspired her? Yet from these impoverished sources she has invented a kind of photographic Arte Povera and produced an absolutely stunning book. Here is a portrait of our times and our culture, delivered via its largely invisible and ignored interiors, that should become an essential document of our age.

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