Shot from the hip! A street level view of 1970s New York

The Guardian

24-04-2025

In July 1973, Mark Cohen spent a month living in a dorm room at NYU while taking part in a film production workshop. His daily classes were short so he used his free time to walk around the city with his camera. Only a few of the images were printed at the time and the vast majority remained unseen, except as negatives, until now. Tall Socks by Mark Cohen is published by GOST
Mark Cohen has been taking pictures since he was 14 and is best-known for his work made in his native city of Wilkes-Barre in Pennsylvania where he would just go out of his door and start to work. He didn't need to travel because there was an infinite set of possibilities and variations on the streets each day. The same working method applied to his short time in New York
Mark Cohen: 'There is usually a certain 'triggering' point in my view of the scene. Something that catches my eye. Many of the frames are made quickly and the compositions are accidental. This picture of the child going along the cobblestone street with the board is intimate and sudden, very beautiful'
'The man with the spoked wheel cart is holding the bored, yawning dog. His leash is attached to a harness with metal rivets. Immediately behind the dog and in a strict rectangle of a still life is a wooden box of fruit. Under the dog's jaw, on the sidewalk, is a plastic bag. The rest of the picture is open space. A lot of formal visual activity is going on but it's swirling around the dog and fruit. In 1973 I skipped this negative, but then in 2024 scanned it and properly saw it for the first time'
'You can clearly see the threat the girl suspects in her eyes. Compositionally, her long bare legs and arm lead up to her face in the extreme corner. The extra thigh, knee and hand of her friend diffuse her vulnerability, because if she was alone it would be a different picture. I like the mended step and the column on the left for contributing to the degraded texture. And in the centre is a dark open doorway. It's all unplanned, an accident, driven by my glance at the legs emerging from the worn setting as I went by'
New York in the 1970s was notorious for high crime rates, social disorder, an unsafe subway and a declining quality of life. Economic stagnation had hit the city hard and many of the middle-class residents had left for the suburbs
This is often evidenced in Cohen's photographs in the graffiti, litter and ruin present on the streets. Yet his images also depict a New York that is full of life and on the move
Although the book's sequencing follows no formal narrative, the pace of the images give the impression of walking around a city whose residents are in a perpetual state of transit with Cohen moving unobtrusively through
There is an undercurrent of threat in some of the images –the glare of a stranger and menacing subway stations – but also humour and joy found in a child's tall socks, a lady with peacock feathers, an incongruous elephant or a girl carrying a plank of wood across a cobblestoned street
There is change from block to block, from step to step, new details and impressions observed
You can read more about this image in our Big Picture feature
Cohen has a singular photographic style resulting from holding his camera at hip level to intuitively photograph, often up close to his subjects
This lends his images an unusual perspective – they show the world viewed from the height of a child, focusing on objects or angles which are often overlooked
By cropping figures and peering curiously into doorways and down streets, the familiar becomes both fresh and strange