DARK KNEES by Mark Cohen

“私は同じ街区をずっと歩き回ったり、ある男の靴を撮ったりしながらシュルレアリストになった。自分自身何をしているか分かっていなかった。自分が見るものに導かれるまま写真を撮ってきた。” - Mark Cohen

70年代のストリート写真を代表するアメリカ人フォトグラファー、マーク・コーエン(Mark Cohen) の作品集。本書で作者は40年以上もの間、故郷ペンシルベニア州ウィルクスバリの炭坑街とその周辺地域を撮影。一瞬で被写体に近づき、カメラのフラッシュで度々人の目を眩ます “グラブショット”と呼ばれる独特の撮影方法を用いて撮影は行われ、モノクロ写真やカラー写真のどちらにおいても大抵フォーカスが合っていなかったり、また顔から下などあえて被写体の一部分しか写していなかったりと、写真の規格に収めない手法を駆使している。

I became a surrealist because I kept walking around the same blocks, and I started taking a picture of a guy’s shoe. I didn’t know what I was doing exactly. I was just being led by whatever I would see. - Mark Cohen

Mark Cohen, a major figure in street photography since the 1970’s. He has been relentlessly photographing his home town, Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania and its surroundings. He wasn’t interested in drawing a social portrait of this coal town, he kept for more than forty years the distant eye of a stranger, always alert. On an impulse of a split second, Cohen would go very to close to his subjects to take what has become his iconic “grab shots” often blinding them with the artificial light of the flash. In black & white and in color, his photographs taken at arm’s length, without focusing most of the time, chop off fragments of gestures, postures or body parts that run over the frame leaving only torsos without face, hands, feet, pairs of legs or simply knees. From this dazzling combination of lines, these images convey a feeling of restless energy and strangeness to daily life.

by Mark Cohen

REGULAR PRICE ¥19,800  (tax incl.)

hardcover
188 pages
170 x 240 mm
color, black and white
2013

shortlist of the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook Awards 2014 - the Photography Catalogue of the Year Prize

published by LE BAL