Groundworks by Mark Cohen

Most of the pictures in this book were made over the last ten years.

I walked around the city and took pictures just like I have always done with no preconceived idea of what subjects to select.
One picture at a time. Each complete in itself. Forty years ago I worked in the same way and with the same technique of taking a very fast and spontaneous image up into the camera and landing it on the film inside.Some of these pictures from the 1970’s are included as a way to illustrate my initial impulse to photograph still lifes. Often strange rebuses like images of snow flakes on a cabbage leaf. The picture possibility had to be decided almost unconsciously - so I snapped and I saw it for the first time in the darkroom, in the negative.

They are not all sharp or made by looking thru the viewfinder.
They are accidental and automatic. and taken furtively and quickly as if when I saw the man or the fragment of food or waste paper I wanted to just pick it up and place it into the cameras as a note - on a frame of the film inside.

That way these pictures are discovered only after the film is developed. First I made a 16x20 inch print of each negative and in it the grain and composition of elements came out to help solidly fix the idea of sleeping on the sidewalk , near a curb attached to a small crust of bread.

What else may have happened is that in-between the few pictures of homeless people that are included is the grounding of their lives with the still lives and landscapes set between them.

It is a catalog of the surface that is with more detail and subjectivity than the modern global view from space.