Image and Music: John Cohen

Artist’s Biography courtesy of L. Parker Stephenson Photographs and the John Cohen family. 

Born in Queens, New York, John Cohen (1932-2019) was a true polymath. Among his many talents were photography, filmmaking, writing, music, folklore, and ethnomusicology. 

Cohen studied painting at Yale University under Josef Albers and photography with Herbert Matter; receiving an MFA in the 1950s. Cohen also researched indigenous Andean weaving in Peru. His photographs of Peru would be the first photographic exhibition held at the Yale University Art Gallery, shown alongside textiles by Anni Albers. Parallel with his research in Peru, Cohen’s interests in old-time music led him to make numerous field recordings in Appalachia. These recordings are an important document of rural culture, contemporaneous with those collected by Alan Lomax and Harry Smith, now held by the Library of Congress. 

Cohen was a founding member of the famed New Lost City Ramblers in 1958, which began a long career as a performer. His photographs of Roscoe Holcomb, Woody Guthrie, Muddy Waters, Elizabeth Cotten, a young Bob Dylan, and many other notable musicians, provide a visual window into this rich aural world. His 1962 film, High Lonesome Sound, became synonymous with that music. Cohen performed regularly with the Downhill Strugglers and was often called upon as a resource for ethnomusicologist scholars and researchers alike.

Herbert and Mercedes Matter would provide introductions for Cohen to the nascent artistic communities in downtown Manhattan when he moved to East Ninth Street and Third Avenue in 1957. The location would be fortuitous: dirt-cheap rents adjacent to the bars and artists’ clubs in Greenwich Village, and the scene of numerous artist-run galleries and performance spaces. Cohen lived next door to Mary and Robert Frank, who would ask Cohen to photograph Frank’s first film, Pull My Daisy (1959), co-directed with painter Alfred Leslie and narrated by Jack Kerouac. Cohen emphasized the ambience and mood among the cast and crew, which included Larry Rivers, Delphine Seyrig, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, David Amran, Richard Bellamy, and Alice Neel. 

John Cohen began making photographs in 1954 when the only work for a photographer was in photojournalism or advertising, neither of which he wanted to do. Rather, he made personal photographs, documenting things which were important to him: mostly artists and musicians. His photographic inquiries lead him to the Andes and to Appalachia, where he photographed traditional musicians in their homes. In addition to gaining fine art notoriety, his images were used on record covers, in television and movie productions, and later informed his film projects. With his long-time publisher, Steidl, Cohen published several photography books. 

Cohen was featured in over forty solo exhibitions across the US; his work was central to group exhibitions presented at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, the Grey Art Gallery at New York University, the Museum of the City of New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, among others. His photographs are in the permanent collections of twenty institutions and his ninth monograph, Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road, was released in September 2019. Invested in the future of the field, Cohen started the photography program at SUNY Purchase in 1972 where he taught for 25 years. His photographic estate is represented by L. Parker Stephenson in New York.