Grim Street

Product Review

Mark Cohen first came to the attention of the photography world in 1973 with a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. This iconic show proved to the art world that Cohen was the heir apparent to the explosive street photography of the 60s. Now, after more than thirty years, Cohen’s complex and influential body of work is presented for the first time in Grim Street, an astonishing collection of Americana as original and effective as the work of Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, or Weegee.

Cohen’s photography confronts the viewer with a startling beauty, rapidly shifting from rough and confrontational to quiet, respectful, and serene. In Grim Street, filled with what Cohen calls “grab shots,” you can easily imagine the photographer guilefully patrolling the streets of Wilkes-Barre, the Pennsylvania mine-town he calls home. His camera, often prefocused and shot from the hip, scrolls around its subjects searching for tidbits of delectable detail. Then suddenly thrusting out towards its subjects, a strobe bursts, capturing a violently cropped spot of stockinged legs creeping around a corner, or a woman’s bared teeth and stretched lips. In these images emerges a cluttered world of visceral, sexualized encounters with the human body.

The photographs are equally fascinating for the inconsistent reaction of their subjects. In one shot, a group of young girls hide their faces with their coats and cower against a brick wall, desperately searching for any protection from Cohen’s camera. Another shot brandishes a dapper young man, hair greased and comb quickly pulled out for the glamour shot. But just when you think that you can’t see the photographs for all the noise, Cohen’s camera stands back in meditation, displaying sensitive compositions of the gardens of Wilkes-Barre and the small town’s residents engaging in their daily comforts. One of the more complex bodies of street photography around, Cohen’s work will open your eyes as wide as they can go and keep you flipping the pages for years to come.

“Cohen’s black-and-white photos…are deliberately disconcerting, almost vulgar….Heads are cropped out of the frame; truncated hands, legs, and arms loom monstrously into view; perspective warps. Cohen wasn’t alone in his harsh, comic view of down-home America, but his in-your-face take and fragmentary results were jarringly unique, and much imitated.” —Vince Aletti, The Village Voice

Customer Reviews

Average Customer Review

(5 customer reviews)

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful

Grim Street Revisited, November 20, 2007

GAR (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grim Street (Hardcover)

I lived on Grim Street . In the mid 1970's I lived in the Heights Section of Wilkes-Barre Pa where Mr Cohen did many of the photos in this fine collection. He was a quiet fixture on those streets on a late Sunday afternoon. One would see the tall lanky stranger in his army fatigue jacket and horn rimmed glasses walking along those streets occassionally stopping to quickly photograph a stray dog or an unwashed child along the sidewalk. There was almost a random approach to his subjects but he would bend and sometimes stoop as he would click off 4 or 5 quick "snaps" of his subject and then be off after his next subject. I was in my early 20's at the time and curious as to how anyone could find interest in those mundane often grimy if not grim scenes in that neighborhood. I now have the answer over 30 years later. This fascinating collection evokes a time and place that could represent any of our inner city neighborhoods. The black and white of the pictures captures the mood and feel of...Read more

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful

Grim Street, February 10, 2005

Village Gardener - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grim Street (Hardcover)

"A lot of it is mood driven, but I don't exactly know where the motive and inspiration to take pictures comes from. So it's very spontaneous work; there's not a lot really to plan." So it would seem at first glance upon Mark Cohen's masterful collection of work presented in his first (and hopefully not last) book Grim Street . From this revealing quote by the author, we are lead to believe that Cohen himself discovers in his darkroom much of the beauty portrayed in his work.

As anyone who has followed Cohen's work knows, Mark has been influenced greatly by the renowned street photographer Cartier-Bresson with his ability to capture the unfolding "decisive moment." But Cohen's work is anything but unfolding, on the contrary; it is literally in-your-face obtrusive, grabbing on film fleeting sublime moments, otherwise lost forever in eternity. One can almost amusingly imagine Cohen, armed with his trade mark flash and wide angle lens, scurrying around a photo-opportunity...Read more

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

'Grabshots' Illuminate the Grim Streets of Wilkes-Barre, PA, August 24, 2005

Grady Harp (Los Angeles, CA United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Grim Street (Hardcover)

Mark Cohen is a restless poet of a photographer. In GRIM STREET he demonstrates his enormous ability to grasp a winking moment of life in the back streets, isolated fleeting views of the ordinary made extraordinary. This very fine book of photographs is less attuned to compositionally correct images as emotionally charged ones. As such it is a monograph of the smarmy, dark, seedy and at times embarrassingly immediate life of the underbelly of America as represented by the streets of Wilkes-Barre, PA.

Cohen's successful forays in to this territory are accompanied by 'interviews' conducted by Anne Wilkes Tucker and Thomas Southall. The composite result is a book that 'reads' like a novel and will remain compelling present in the mind's eye long after perusing it. Fine work! Grady Harp, August 05