About The Book
Photographs taken in New York over 50 years ago by Mark Cohen will be published for the first time in Tall Socks. In July 1973 Cohen spent a month living in a dorm room at NYU while taking part in a film production workshop. His daily classes were short so he used his free time to walk around the city with his camera. Only a few of the images were printed at the time and the vast majority remained unseen, except as negatives, until now.
New York in the 1970s was notorious for high crime rates, social disorder, an unsafe subway and a declining quality of life. 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. Publisher’s Info
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About The Artist
Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania and with the exception of a short time in Europe, lived and worked there for most of his life. Cohen worked for many years as a portrait photographer at his studio in Wilkes-Barr and his personal work on the streets was made in his spare time. His work was first exhibited in 1969 at the George Eastman House but came to prominence with his first solo exhibition at MoMA in 1973.
Cohen is the recipient of two Guggenheim Grants and his work is held by numerous public collections including Centre Pompidou, Paris, The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney, New York; Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art; and V&A Museum, London. His work has been the subject of international exhibitions and the most recent retrospective was in 2013 at Le Bal in Paris and accompanied by the publication Dark Knees. In 2015 Frame. A Retrospective was published by the University of Texas press.
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Specifics
Mark Cohen: Tall Socks (Gost Books, 2025) | 185 x 254 mm | 128 pages | 73 images | Hardback. Link.
