Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he continued to live and work until recently moving to Philadelphia. His work was first exhibited at George Eastman House in 1969 and he had his first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in 1973. He won Guggenheim Fellowships in 1971 and 1976 and a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship in 1976. In 2013 his retrospective Dark Knees was shown at Le Bal, Paris and the Nederlands Fotomuseum, Rotterdam. Best known for his work in black and white, he also made a foray into colour with a series of dye-transfer prints in the 1970s.

Cohen literally shoots from the hip. He eschews the viewfinder and uses a wide-angle lens to a present a raw and fragmented vision of the working-class town of Wilkes-Barre. Blasts of flash add drama and a sense of movement. Cohen’s photographs share some features with the American street photographers who preceded him, such Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Diane Arbus, as well as earlier masters such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, but his surrealist sensibility, at once elegant and off-kilter, humorous and slightly creepy, is his alone.