""A street photographer is a photographer who works on Fifth Avenue in New York," states Mark Cohen (born 1943) in Trespass, with more than a hint of suspicion: "I'm like an alley photographer. I go everywhere to take pictures." In one sense, this is borne out in Cohen's unique, if strangely dislocated, work: abrupt and close-cropped colour shots of people, places and found objects taken-even stolen-at close quarters,"
"While he has photographed in Mexico and Europe and, in 1973, produced a striking series of black-and-white images of New York City street scenes-published for the first time in 2025 by GOST Books-the lion's share of Cohen's photographs take place in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he lived and worked for 70 years before relocating to Philadelphia in 2014."
"As a generous selection of Cohen's Wilkes-Barre photographs, mostly taken in the 1970s and 1980s, Trespass offers an exciting introduction to the work of one of America's most groundbreaking and rule-breaking photographers, one whose work, to borrow a line from the poet John Ashbery, showcases "the richness of life and time as they happen to us"."
Mark Cohen produces abrupt, close-cropped color and black-and-white street photographs that invade subjects' personal space, often taken surreptitiously with flash. He concentrated most of his work in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he lived and worked for seventy years before moving to Philadelphia in 2014. Cohen experimented with early color film speeds and a confrontational, intimate approach that captured ordinary people, places and found objects at close quarters. Trespass presents a generous selection of his Wilkes-Barre images, mainly from the 1970s and 1980s, framing Cohen as a groundbreaking, rule-breaking photographer whose images reveal life and time as they happen.
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