Since the early 1970s Cohen has been photographing living rooms, men’s clubs, classrooms, spas and military installations. Trained as a sculptor and printmaker, when Pop Art and Minimalism were dominant in the art world, she has a long-standing interest in the artificial and the everyday. She focuses on the psychological, sociological and political aspects of her subjects. But primarily she is concerned with the way things appear and function in our lives. As she once observed, “I feel as if the world can’t be like it is. It seems full of finished works of art.” The disorientation her photographs provoke is largely the result of the specific and mysterious nature of the places she photographs with their odd symmetries and disjunctions. Her work is marked by a strong visual and formal sense, one that conspires with the content to get under one’s skin.
Images via Women in Photography NYC
