In Memory of Lynne Cohen
In learning of Lynne Cohen’s recent passing, we look back at the impact of her images and celebrate her still and focused photographic works.
Spa, 2000, chromogenic print, 130 x 150 cm. Images courtesy Olga Korper Gallery, Toronto.
“Simply speaking, a room is a box, a container or apparatus that serves to hold and to gather, which is to say, a room frames; this initiates the setting up of self-referentiality in Cohen’s photographs. Room stypically have doors as points of entry and exit, and often windows. Rooms always have corners, although occasionally they are round and are often linked together in ensembles, even to the point where, imagining the implications of this linking, terror intervenes. Rooms are essentially a metaphysical entity: they gather and contain and, like photographs, control and direct the flux of time and space, marking off here from there, a space of home from foreign space. The quintessential room is a cell, a frame or a stage. Kafka is the artist of the room, par excellence, but perhaps also the playwrights Pinter and Beckett. And, as it is for these three artists, the light that guides Cohen’s vision is that of compassion manifested here in her insight into the human space of our everyday in-habitation.” -Stephen Horne, from Rooms of Her Own: The Comfortable Strangeness of Lynne Cohen’s Photographs
For more on Stephen Horne’s 2011 interview, see here.
To read the entire interview in your own copy of Photography, Issue #119, see here.
More on Lynne Cohen in Border Crossings can be read in Issue 123, Dreams and the Spaces In Between.
Lynne Cohen’s exhibition, Between Something and Nothing, can currently be seen at the Winnipeg Art Gallery until the end of June.
