What We Hath Wrought: Lynne Cohen’s Vision (Not Food)
We first met Lynne some thirty years ago, long before she became so famous, when she came to visit her philosopher partner in our little university town.
She swept in, determined to make the photographic best of her few days there.
“Let me see the Yellow Pages,” she said, “and in a matter of hours I will know more about any town than people who have lived there for years.”
It sounds obvious, perhaps. It had never occurred to me however. And as I travelled about the United States, I adopted the tactic she had taught me. No longer did I just skim the Yellow Pages for the local restaurants. Cement companies, beauty parlors, barbecue joints, mining suppliers, used car companies all began to add up to a picture of the community that I was encountering.
The Yellow Pages are vanishing. And trees and landfills will benefit. And Lynne will be glad of that. I have yet to figure out whether on-line resources will give me anything like this quick thumbnail sketch of the life of a town or city.
And as I looked at Lynne’s spare and unsparing photographs of the spaces that we humans have made for ourselves, it changed my view of buildings. No longer did I see them brimming with life, but stripped of that life. What curious, chilly spaces remained.
In June, Lynne Cohen won the Scotiabank Photography Award, and it doesn’t get much better than that. You will find a sample of her photos Lynne Cohen’s web page.
And the awful irony is that Lynne is having to spend a good bit of time in hospitals now. That’s not something anyone enjoys. What extra sadness\tension\distance, though, can it create in someone who has spent their life documenting the space that humans have wrought for themselves?
For Lynne.
