Local photographer, international reputation

Photographer Mark Cohen at a book signing at Le Bal in Paris

When I was a kid living on Greenwood Hill in Pottsville, we staged a Tom Thumb wedding at the local playground. Everyone got involved, even the bullies, decked out in their Sunday best. We girls wore frilly dresses and plastic hair bands with veils attached. In the empty lot that was our playground, we lined up for photographs and a few days later, there we were, on display in The Pottsville Republican.

I still have that photo, I can still name the kids huddled around the bride, and, what strikes me is how dusty we were. Despite our finery, despite our efforts to look our best, our patent leather Mary Janes had lost their sheen and the boys’ oxfords looked shabby and gray. It wasn’t our fault. We had done our best, but the playground was no more than coal dirt and every step we took stirred up a cloud of dust.

Playing baseball, when we slid into base, we blackened our pants and sneakers. Wearing shorts, we darkened our bare knees. Blackened sneakers, dark knees, the stuff of summers spent on coal banks and coal dirt lots.

“Dark Knees,” I’ve just been to a photography exhibit in Paris bearing that name. The photographer, a pioneer of street photography with an international reputation, is from Wilkes Barre, PA. His name is Mark Cohen and for over fifty years, night after night, after days spent in a commercial photography studio, he has tracked pictures, an affair of choice and chance, in the streets of Wilkes Barre, Scranton and towns in between.

I did not know Mark Cohen’s work and I discovered him and it listening to the radio, listening to an announcer struggle in French with the pronunciation of “Wilkes Barre,” as I asked myself if he was really talking about the Wilkes Barre that I know. Listening more closely, I learned that a photographer from that town was showing his work at “Le Bal,” an exhibition space in Paris devoted to photography. Checking out the information on the web, I promptly got on the metro and went to see the show.

There, against blood-red walls, I discovered a continuous line of 16 by 20 photographs, mostly black-and-white, travelling across the four walls of a large underground exhibition space. I did not discover Wilkes Barre or the coal region: no breakers, no strip mines, no deserted downtown that had once seen better days. There was nothing that deliberately drew attention to a specific time or place. There weren’t even people, at least not people posing, composed faces, bodies shot from head to toe.

Instead, there are fragments: a coat collar, a pearled eyeglass chain, a chin, a brooch; two calves wrapped in rayon knee socks, two feet wearing leather buckle shoes. Sometimes there is only a forehead, a hairline; bodies without head or feet; hands folded in the lap of a girl wearing cut-off jeans; a bare bony torso; dark knees against a background of vacant lots and clapboard houses, with a stairway leading to paradise…

There are also still lifes: the tops of unlaced boots, a string of outdoor lights, tomatoes ripening on an old wooden table in somebody’s backyard.

copyright Mark Cohen

These fragments, these photos, often beautiful and shot through with a disturbing grace, are not restful. Mark Cohen’s exhibition is not restful. Truncated bodies, defiant or frightened eyes, a fist slammed against a car window with the photographer inside, connote aggression and this notion is inherent to Cohen’s technique and work.

Mark Cohen has defined himself as a “trigger-happy gunslinger” and he has called his way of taking photos “grab shots.” Working for 35 years as a commercial photographer, when he closed shop each day, he began a second life, becoming a different person from the man “doing” weddings or annual reports. At nightfall, he set out, a stalker of sorts, with three rolls of film, a lightweight camera and a flash, entering a world filled with pictures, out there waiting for him. What was necessary, as much as style and technique, was the courage to make the “grab.”

Walking through the streets of Wilkes Barre, Cohen, like a gunslinger, shot from the hip, camera in one hand, flash in the other. Constantly on the move but using a wide-angle lens, he had to get close to people, dangerously close at times, confronting raised fists, threats, insults, and run-ins with the police. Approaching his subjects, according himself “artistic licence” to burst into their lives, Cohen “flashed” them, grabbing the picture and then, just as quickly, merging back into the flow of street life.

Returning to his studio after having shot more than 100 photos, he might make no more than eight prints. In many of the shots, choice and accident did not mesh—or the picture he envisioned did not take off once he captured it within the rectangle that is his signature format, one he never crops.

The next night, he was back in the street, following instinct, believing chance, luck, fate, call it what you will, would deliver new treasures, fragments of himself as much as of the place where he anchored his work. Night after night, Mark Cohen forayed into the streets of Wilkes Barre, fueled by a shot of adrenaline and the desire to delve deeper into himself.

Recognition and critical acclaim came early and in 1973, at age 30, the photographer had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Had he settled in the city, he might have become a star of the New York photography world. Instead, after a quick visit, Mark Cohen got back in his car and drove home to Wilkes Barre because he “felt like he wasn’t done there.”

Forty years later, the photographer moved to Philadelphia. It took a long time to wrap things up.

Mark Cohen claims he could have just as well taken his photos in Elmira, NY, as in Wilkes Barre, PA. I’m not so sure. Too much coal dust, too much darkness, too much grace born of a violent, mystical marriage between a man and a place: the coal region of northeastern Pennsylvania, an intrinsic part of that self he mined for nearly fifty years.

Some readers may already know Mark Cohen’s work. Some may have seen his 2010 exhibit at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. There is also a book, Grim Streets, published in 2005. But, except for a college show in the early sixties, there has never been an exhibit of his work on his home turf. Too close for comfort? I wish we could have a chance to tell.

The French, one big happy family?

What would I do without the metro? Despite the crowds, the smells, the sticky heat, it remains a constant source of wonder and discovery for me. Just last week, sitting in a crowded train, my head bowed, my attention focused on the screen of my cell phone, like almost everybody else around me, I was wrenched from a virtual world back into the real by a woman’s cry.

Rising above the whoosh and thud of the closing of the safety gate on the platform and the doors of the car where we sat, I could detect fear, panic, desperation in that voice. Then, as the train pulled out of the station, beyond a wall of standing commuters who, less fortunate than me, had not found a seat, there was commotion, as if a scuffle had broken out. I craned my neck to get a better look and discovered, not a fight, but a scene of wonder of almost biblical proportions!

There, in our midst (and soon everybody was talking, concerned, amazed, perplexed), sat an infant in its stroller, unruffled and alone. His mother, still back on the platform of the last station, had pushed the carriage into the metro car, but the doors closed before she made it inside herself.

Suddenly, all of us, indifferent strangers only a few instants before, were connected, transformed into a makeshift family, responsible for the little boy literally thrust into our care. We consulted, decisions were made, and finally it was decided that the man who initially grabbed the carriage, saving the child from being crushed in the closing doors, would get off at the next station, to deliver the child into the hands of the transportation authorities. He was wearing a suit and tie, as were the two friends who accompanied him, respectable-looking types, “family men.”

As they got off, we waved good-bye to the still serene toddler and his rescuers and went on discussing this exceptional happening. The presence of the child, our sense of concern for his well-being, had somehow united us.

Mulling over this experience, I’ve come to see it as a means for me to wrap my mind around one aspect of French society that, despite my 25 years in this country, has always remained foreign to me. I am talking about French “family policy,” light-years away in its conception and practice from what Americans would call “child welfare.”

For a few minutes in a crowded metro car, a group of commuters, perfect strangers, became a family, responsible for a child too young, perhaps too scared, to tell us his name. On a permanent basis, year-in, year-out, this is what French family policy asks of French society: those of us who work and pay taxes constitute one big family, responsible for every child in France, where “family welfare,” not child welfare, is at the system’s heart.

It has been this way since 1932. At that time, based on a philosophy that made society responsible for the well-being of all its families, family welfare benefits, regardless of income or family situation, were first put in place.

And since then, this philosophy has stuck. The family welfare benefit known as the “allocations familiales” is not need-based, meaning a family with three children earning, let’s say, $20,000 a year receives the same family allowance as one earning $85,000—or more. In concrete terms, in 2013, this means each family would receive about $380 in family welfare benefits each month. I suspect this idea is a bit unsettling to many Americans’ minds, as it is to mine.

Since 1946, when French family welfare took an aggressively pro-birth turn, the more the merrier. For example, today, a family with six children receives about one thousand dollars a month in aid, more than double the benefits of a family with three. This may in part explain why, within the European Union, only the Republic of Ireland has a higher birth-rate than France.

Besides generous family welfare, France also offers an extensive network of municipal day-care centers. In my neighborhood alone, there are more than thirty, though that’s not enough to keep up with the demand of young parents “contributing” to France’s current baby boom. In the street, in busses, in the metro, there are children and strollers everywhere. City playgrounds are packed; so are the elementary schools, where children can enter full-day kindergarten when they are 3 years old.

Yes, France takes care of its children and since 1981, the year Socialist François Mitterrand was elected President, more need-based aids have been put into place. Besides the back-to-school allowance, created in 1974 to help low- and middle-income parents pay for the school supplies of children between the ages of 6 and 18 (about $450 per child in 2013), there are aids to help finance at-home day-care, a family rent or mortgage allowance, as well as supplementary monthly benefits for low-income parents with young children.

Finally, once their birth is registered, all children are immediately covered by the national insurance plan of their parents.

In the past twenty years, on both sides of the political divide, there have been protests that France’s generous family policy is more than the country can afford. Most recently, in May of this year, François Hollande’s socialist government proposed adjusting family welfare benefits to family income. In other words, the rich would receive less, and perhaps the poor more, but, despite surveys showing 68% of the French in favor of such a measure, the government backed off, fearful of negative reactions at the polls.

Instead, tax laws have been changed so that, as of 2014, families earning over $50,000 a year, will be paying more income tax than in the past, putting an end to a system of deductions largely favorable to well-off families.

In France, only one household in two pays any income tax at all. As a single, working woman, I pay a lot and sometimes it irks me to think I am contributing to the “welfare” of the wealthiest families of France. On the whole, however, I am glad to pay and to participate in the creation of a safety net that benefits us all. And as my recent experience in the metro brought home to me, we are indeed all members of one big family known as humankind.