Tall Socks.

Photographs by Mark Cohen.

GOST Books, London, 2025. 128 pp., 73 images, 7¼x10x¾".

In July 1973 Cohen spent a month living in a dorm room at NYU while taking part in a film production workshop. His daily classes were short so he used his free time to walk around the city with his camera. Only a few of the images were printed at the time and the vast majority remained unseen, except as negatives, until now.

New York in the 1970s was notorious for high crime rates, social disorder, an unsafe subway and a declining quality of life. Economic stagnation had hit the city hard and many of the middle-class residents had left for the suburbs. This is often evidenced in Cohen’s photographs in the graffiti, litter and ruin present on the streets but his images also depict a New York which is full of life and on the move. Although the book’s sequencing follows no formal narrative, the pace of the images give the impression of walking around a city whose residents are in a perpetual state of transit with Cohen moving unobtrusively through this. There is change from block to block, from step to step, and details and impressions are observed. There is an undercurrent of threat in some of the images—the glare of a stranger and menacing subway stations—but also humour and joy found in a child’s tall socks, a lady with peacock feathers, an incongruous elephant or a girl carrying a plank of wood across a cobblestoned street.

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Cat# IG339H Hardbound $65.00 (978-1-915423-74-0)
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