Mark Cohen: Dark Knees

TIME

Chris Boot

It's a modest, book, with a startling beauty: the photographs, which are exhilarating; their exquisite reproduction, mainly in rich, soft black and white, but with the occasional varnished color picture by contrast; the use of Cohen’s banal descriptors of each of the pictures, in his own naïve hand, as the book’s text (‘Flashed head top,’ ‘Dog between houses,’ ‘Snow falling in alley,’ ‘Ants on sidewalk,’ etc.); the rhythm of the book; and its brilliantly understated design.

The New York Times Magazine

Clinton Cargill

The whole picture is always somehow just outside the frame in Mark Cohen’s frenetic documentations of life in Wilkes-Barre and Eastern Pennsylvania. Maybe he is too caught up snapping the pattern of an overcoat or the casual gesture of a passerby, a chunk of snow melting on the street or the shadow cast by a few apples sitting on a newspaper. But the Pennsylvania he sees — in photographs that span decades, mostly in black and white, with snatches of color — is raw and captivating.

The New Yorker

Working on the streets of his coal-blackened home town, Wilkesbarre, Pennsylvania, Cohen makes rude, alarming, and often hilarious photographs... The pictures are radically cropped, lopping off heads and feet and zeroing in on grimmy knees, gesturing hands, and a bare midriff. The hectic mood of this terrific show of color and black-and-white images is broken only by a few black-alley landscapes and still-lifes of debris on the ground, including a gum wrapper that has the uncanny presence of a tiny Claes Oldenburg sculpture.

Bookforum

Albert Mobilio

Even Mark Cohen's early photographs look utterly contemporary. Most of the images in this volume, which spans 1969 to 2012, date from the '70s and early '80s, but their seemingly haphazard visual style—oddly canted perspectives, complex compositions, and a general fixation on disconnected parts of people and things—suggests nothing so much as the smartphone videos that are now a mainstay of our journalistic and voyeuristic consumption.