Alan Cohen: Earth with Meaning

by W.J. Thomas Mitchell, Roger Manley (Introduction), Alan Cohen (Photographer)

An encounter with Aaron Siskind inspired American photographer Alan Cohen (born 1943) to abandon his doctoral program in thermodynamics and instead pursue a career in photography under Siskind’s tutelage. For the past two decades Cohen has traveled the world, using the medium of black-and-white photography to record places marked by the political acts or the covert actions of others; places marked by time through the course of natural and often catastrophic occurrences. Crumbling stone walls and other near-invisible demarcations of political boundaries are among the mute witnesses he chooses as his subjects. “I have come to understand that history, in a contemporary image, can be sited,” Cohen writes. “Events can--and do--become geography.” This book tracks the evolution of Cohen’s work over a 40-year career, reflecting the artist’s belief in photography as both a social document and a meditative art.

260 pages, Hardcover

First published January 15, 2012

About the author

William J. Thomas Mitchell is a professor of English and Art History at the University of Chicago. Editor of the journal Critical Inquiry.

His monographs, Iconology (1986) and Picture Theory (1994), focus on media theory and visual culture. He draws on ideas from Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx to demonstrate that, essentially, we must consider pictures to be living things. His collection of essays What Do Pictures Want? (2005) won the Modern Language Association's prestigious James Russell Lowell Prize in 2005. In a recent podcast interview Mitchell traces his interest in visual culture to early work on William Blake, and his then burgeoning interest in developing a science of images. In that same interview he discusses his ongoing efforts to rethink visual culture as a form of life and in light of digital media.