When he was about 30, the celebrated American photographer Mark Cohen lived in a dorm at New York University while spending a month at the film school there. In breaks from classes, he would wander the streets of the city taking pictures. Nearly all those images were unprinted and until recently existed only as negatives. A new book, Tall Socks, collects that work for the first time.
This picture of a kid with his hand in the bubble gum machine is freighted with the weight of time and place of that backstory; those of us of a certain age will be able to recall the exact fairground feel and resistance of the handle that ejected the gum in its little plastic pod, as well as that eternal childish hope that someone might, this time, have left the prize – with its free-gift creepy-crawly – in the chute, waiting to be discovered.
Cohen’s pictures themselves, as you turn the page, carry a similar sense of anticipation. They capture that period, before attempts to sanitise the street life of the city, when New York’s more desperate characters seemed to emerge from the subways in an endless stream. The ordinary faces that Cohen found, from Manhattan to the Bowery to Coney Island, demand a soundtrack from the Velvet Underground and a shot at fame at the Factory.
Some are carrying things; one woman strides purposefully through Cohen’s frame with a bundle of peacock feathers under her arm; a boy carries a plank that could be a coffin lid. If flesh is on show, somebody always seems to be grabbing for it; when money changes hands, it carries the sweat of a thousand transactions. It is no surprise that these streets gave rise to the noir films of that period; as Cohen’s pictures show, all you had to do was go outside and look, and stories came at you from all sides.
