Background
Alan Barry Cohen was born on August 28, 1943 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States.
(An encounter with Aaron Siskind inspired American photogr...)
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.
https://www.amazon.com/Alan-Cohen-Meaning-W-J-T-Mitchell/dp/0983121737/?tag=2022091-20
2012
Alan Barry Cohen was born on August 28, 1943 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, United States.
Alan Barry Cohen received a Bachelor of Science in Nuclear Engineering from North Carolina State University in Raleigh (1966) and a Master of Science from Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design in Chicago (1972). He also attended the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1972.
Since 1976 Alan Barry Cohen has taught at Columbia College in Chicago, and previously taught at Barat College in Lake Forest, Illinois (1978), Northern Virginia Community College, Alexandria (1975-1976), and Illinois Institute of Technology's Institute of Design (1972-1974). He worked at Argonne National Laboratory in Argonne, Illinois, from 1966 to 1969. Alan Barry Cohen has written criticism for Aperture (1976-1978) and for the Washington Star (1979).
(An encounter with Aaron Siskind inspired American photogr...)
2012He belongs to CCP, VSW, GEH, CAA and Friends of Photography. Cohen won a NEA Art Critic Fellowship and an NEH Summer Seminar Fellowship in 1978.
Working in black-and-white, 35mm and 6 x 6cm formats, he chooses as his primary subjects the natural landscape and the nude. The photographer makes extensive use of electronic flash coupled to slow shutter speeds.
Quotes from others about the person
"Cohen's project is to explore, at the end of a century of mass death, how to represent historical trauma in a manner true to our own moment... His gift to us is to show us how to comprehend traces of history that are more radical than any of the inherited images that populate our mental archive"
Sander Gilman, from the Introduction of On European Ground, University of Chicago Press.