Through the Lens of Lynne Cohen: Places with “Something to Say”

The acquisition of this group of photographs by Lynne Cohen has given us a more complete representation of the artist in our collection. We now have a diverse array of works that cover her favourite subjects – classrooms, spas, painted murals, waiting rooms – and span from the photos she printed herself in the 1970s, to her large-scale colour works of the 2000s.

In this interview, Andrew Lugg, who now oversees Cohen’s estate, talks about his wife’s work and sheds light on her artistic process.

Lynne initially trained in sculpture and printmaking, and it wasn’t until the early 1970s that she turned to photography. Can you explain what motivated this shift? How did photography become her chosen medium?

Lynne would say she wanted to get out of the studio into the world. She’d been printmaking, drawing on material from consumer catalogues, and thought it natural to move to photographing what was “out there.” The move was not precipitated by lack of success, since in 1967 she won the prestigious Art Institute of Chicago Logan Award for one of her prints, and was being exhibited fairly widely. There’s also the fact that she reckoned that photographing was a less precious medium than etching.

Initially, in the 1970s, she seems to have focused on domestic spaces, private residences and small businesses. In the 1980s, she turned her attention to military installations, laboratories and other strange and unusual places. What prompted this new direction?

The domestic spaces Lynne photographed in the early ’70s came about because she offered her services to a real estate agency on the assumption that she could take a picture or two for her own use with her large-format camera in addition to the 35 mm pictures for the agency. She also took a couple pictures of her family home and the nextdoor neighbour’s home (which was never identified as such). But by 1971, when she heard Walker Evans talk about his photography, which she greatly admired, she was photographing a wider range of subjects and had become fully committed to working with an 8" x 10" camera. The military installations and laboratories came later. While she was initially regarded as belonging to the “new topographic movement,” which focused on the urban environment, her aims and interests were different. For one thing, she mostly photographed interiors and didn’t work in series or on a single subject. She would have a number of subjects on the go at the same time and dropped subjects when, as she put it, they held no more secrets. For quite a long time in the ’70s, she was fascinated by men’s clubs (while at the same time repelled by their smell of stale cigarettes) and would seek them out in each new town she visited. We travelled a lot with the express purpose of giving her the opportunity to take pictures. Sometimes this was successful, sometimes not. In those years and later she was constantly searching for places she thought had “something to say.”

These places, be they domestic or institutional, are singular: some because of their peculiar architectural features; others because of incongruous details, like unusual accessories or elements of decor. How did Lynne find these spaces?

She talked a lot about her years as a sculptor (1964-1967), and she continued to be interested in materials throughout her life. This and her interest in consumer catalogue illustrations left a deep mark on her work. She never lost her fascination with the look of plywood, shag carpet (which she hated with a passion) and other photogenic materials. This, plus the incongruous details you mention, the ubiquity of wonky electric plugs and such, appealed and amused her to no end. She was not a documentary photographer who took the best picture she could of the place where she was, but a photographer who sought out mysterious or unusual sites that in one way or another revealed the remarkable ways we fashion the environment for ourselves. She often stressed that she was less out to document the “objective world” than out to “document what was in her head.” As for finding places, she had various strategies. Early on, she would scour the Yellow Pages. Later, she spent a lot of time seeking possible places to photograph on the computer. She would also ask people in charge of the sites she was photographing where there were similar places – an especially helpful strategy in the case of military establishments and research units. In addition, she kept her eyes open. I recall her disappearing on many occasions to explore what seemed a promising site. Mostly nothing came from this but sometimes it did. She had a special eye, what I call a “sideways on” way of looking, and noticed things that other people, myself included, only saw when they viewed the finished photograph.

Would she intervene in the scenes she captured? Did she modify or arrange the sites and elements she found there?

Once Lynne found somewhere she thought worth capturing she photographed it straight, usually taking just a single shot. Basically, the places are as she found them. The most she intervened was to remove something of no consequence, a tissue left on the floor, for instance. She talked of the place she photographed as found art installations, or “ready-mades.” Contrary to what one New York critic supposed, she didn’t fabricate the places in her pictures. “How could I?” she said, “It would cost a fortune.”

Lynne’s photographs frequently play with this theme of the image within the image. We often find murals, or depictions of the outdoors, forests, animals or humans that almost never appear as actual subjects in the pictures. How did she approach this dimension in her practice?

This is indeed an important element in Lynne’s work. She often talked of how the outdoors creeps into the indoors. Also, there are never any humans, only traces of them along with silhouettes and dummies – there are many of these. But that’s it. I don’t know why she gravitated to spaces with murals and other such items but, as you note, they certainly caught her attention and are distinctive of a lot of her work. One possibility is that she read about the aedicules present in many Baroque paintings and became fascinated with them. She very much liked the idea of a little house inside a big house. Also, I think she knew, perhaps instinctively, that having people in a picture would detract from what interested her most, the backgrounds and physical look of places.

Can you comment on the way Lynne titled her works? The titles often appear to be generic, sometimes even misleading, as they don't seem to reflect exactly what’s in front of us.

Lynne thought a lot about titling. When she first started photographing, she would title work by location and date, so, for instance, one picture is titled Exhibition Hall, Place Bonaventure, Montreal, Quebec. Sometime in the ’80s, I think it was, she started giving pictures more generic titles stencilled on the mat. So, one is titled Corridor, and there are many titled Classroom and others, Spa. She did this mainly, I think, because she wanted her work to be classified as “in the documentary style,” as Walker Evans put it, rather than as “documentary photography.” Still later, she stopped titling and dating the work altogether, a nightmare for our effort to produce a digital catalogue. Since this decision caused a problem for her gallerists, who needed to be able to identify work, she provided “hidden titles,” which unsurprisingly didn’t remain hidden. And in the last twenty or so years, she titled work as “Untitled” with an identifying title; so, for instance, Untitled (Nicotina).

You mentioned earlier Lynne’s amusement over the details uncovered in the spaces she decided to photograph. I also see a touch of wittiness perhaps in some of these hidden titles, which I sometimes think of as nicknames. Two untitled works Duchamp’s Fountain and Mystic Lamb immediately spring to my mind. Did humour play any part in Lynne’s work?

I think this is very important. The humour in the work is often missed. Lynne didn’t want to be funny, though she could be funny talking about her photographs. Your word “wit” is more to the point. She was after what is sometimes referred to as comedy. I was always intrigued and impressed by her wry take on the world. She found much of what is out there amusing, even when she didn’t go for it. The way a military tank looks like a toy, for instance. This was deep in her. She had strong views but didn’t believe in hitting people over the head with them. Just how the sort of person she was infiltrated the work interests me. I’m sure it does but can’t say how. Perhaps the fact that I can’t pin it down is itself part of the answer. As you note, the titles are revealing. Sometimes they draw attention to something Lynne found odd, sometimes to something she liked or someone she respected. She would always avoid the pretentious and overblown, however. This is, I feel, part of the comedy.

It was only quite late, at the end of the 1990s, that Lynne turned to colour photography. What new role did colour play in her photographic oeuvre, which until then had unfolded strictly in black and white?

Lynne came to colour much later than most. In the ’90s, she was making large (e.g., 30" x 40") black and white pictures, and she stuck with the format throughout most of the decade. Precision and lack of grain were always important to her, and she wanted her big prints to be as precise and grain-free as her early 8" x 10" contact prints; something that was not possible, as she saw it, with large-format colour printing in the ’90s. Also she was, like many photographers of her generation, a huge fan of black and white photography. It was only when she could produce “perfect” colour prints that she began to produce them. She worked at this in secret for several years, before she had enough prints that she was satisfied with for a show. Her first show of colour work was in 1999. It’s also worth mentioning that colour was not entirely absent earlier: in the ’80s and ’90s, she exhibited black and white work in coloured frames. During these years I would tell her I thought she had something to say in colour, but she was unpersuaded. It was only when she realized colour printing was never true, and there was something mysterious about it to investigate that she switched and began working exclusively in colour. She never lost her love for black and white photography, but from the early 2000s until the end of her life, it was, as far as her own work was concerned, a thing of the past. Oddly enough, the move to colour was pretty seamless. I remember viewing a show in the early 2000s that included both old black and white pictures and new colour ones and not being consciously aware of which were which.