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Lynne Cohen is an internationally renowned photographer who presents striking images of interior domestic or work settings. Her scenes, usually photographed in black and white, are notable for their flat lighting and absence of human figures. These photographs are at times humourous, and at times disturbing.

her work:

This sense of unstated possibility characterises Cohen’s images, which she described as being ‘like picture windows you can fall into’. These photographs are not only studies of man-made environments and architecture but also a study of history and culture, drawing attention to the interior environments where people pass most of their time, whether working, relaxing, training or socialising.

Since the 1970s Lynne Cohen has developed conceptual artwork that has consistently taken as subject empty interior spaces, which she photographs using an analogue view camera. As a sculpture student in the 1960s, she became interested in the way Pop artists glorified the mundane, everyday life and common objects, which led her to create her first readymade environments in 1969-70. To do so, she physically delimitated sites that she considered extraordinary as if they were crime scenes, and explained to the public where to stand and what to look at. Around the same time, she cut out pictures of domestic interiors and consumer goods in catalogues and used them in prints and silkscreens, after which she ended up directly photographing people’s interiors in 1971, the official year of her first photograph. While these first black and white contact prints reveal a neutral perspective – a neutrality sometimes reminiscent of minimal art or Art & Language –, the furniture and settings are framed according to a carefully structured symmetry.It's difficult to say, except that I seem drawn to interiors that are strange as well as familiar. I sometimes think they find me rather than the other way around. But what you say is true. Pretty much everything I've photographed has an air of strangeness. This is curious, because the subject matter is quite banal - a living room, a classroom, a spa… The strangeness is partly due to the fact that the ordinary is often more menacing than the blatantly bizarre, which can be easily dismissed as impossible. Perhaps it is also because the places are so familiar that they are a bit too close for comfort.Yet another thing is that the camera singles out details that do not normally draw much attention and then tends to exaggerate their significance. I should also say that I often find the spaces to be as absurd as the objects themselves. They resemble stages on which complicated stories are about to be played out, though it is never quite clear what story is being told. The incomprehensibility of the narrative contributes to the weirdness.

lynne cohen

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