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John Cohen
State of the Art
BY CARLY CARIOLI



A Jimmy Rodgers record is playing in the background, and a light snow has fallen in Putnam Valley, New York, where John Cohen keeps a barn full of music, pictures, and memories. Now in his 70th year, the pioneering roots musician, critic, documentarian, recordist, photographer, filmmaker, enthusiast, and scholar is being treated to his first major photographic retrospective, " There Is No Eye. " The title is from Bob Dylan, who paid tribute to Cohen in the liner notes to Highway 61 Revisited.

Opening at the Photographic Resource Center this Friday and scheduled to tour for a couple years, the exhibit is a window into one of the great musical and cultural journeys of the 20th century. A confidant to and co-conspirator of the Beats and abstract-expressionist painters and nascent folk revivalists who populated his corner of New York City in the late 1950s and early ’60s, Cohen captured the flowering of the young Bob Dylan, Red Grooms rolling a canvas across Third Avenue in a wheelbarrow, Jack Kerouac listening to himself on the radio, Robert Frank making Pull My Daisy. He ventured afield to discover the living embodiment of the ’20s and ’30s string-band music that had been championed by his vastly influential roots ensemble the New Lost City Ramblers. Among the musicians he encountered and photographed were Bill Monroe, the Stanley Brothers, Eck Robertson, and Roscoe Holcomb, who inspired Cohen’s deathless phrase " the high-lonesome sound. " That was also the title of Cohen’s most famous documentary, whose subject was Kentucky mountain music.

When I mention Holcomb, Cohen recalls, " To me the amazing thing is that he had no desire to be on the radio or to make records. That’s the odd part, because he brought all that intensity into his own life. And for his community, as much as they wanted to hear it. And as I say these words, I suddenly hear a terrible parallel to myself. "

So what catches his eye these days? " I don’t feel like repeating myself. I can’t get back to where we were in the early ’60s. That was an extraordinary time, for me at least. It was when Bob Dylan came to New York, Jack Kerouac was there, the abstract-expressionist painters were there — the convergence of all those forces. And me going off to Kentucky, and the Ramblers were forming. I’m living out in the country now. It’s pretty different. Each one of those different topics has become a major city within the city in the art world, and it wasn’t that way back then. "

In an odd way, though, the rest of the world is coming around to John Cohen’s way of seeing and hearing — only now, 50 years after he first beckoned us to look and listen. " What’s happened this past year, the things that I’ve been working for, and the Ramblers have been working for, for all these years, it all came into a flower in a way. You had O Brother, Where Art Thou? and The Songcatcher, and Jim Brown’s American Roots project — these are things we’ve been working on for our whole lives. "

Cohen was among the first to bring those sounds to light, but for a long time his photographs, as he says, were of service only " to the folk-music world; that’s how it’s been mostly seen. And I regret a little that I didn’t make the assertion earlier that I am a photographer, that I’m aspiring to a lot in my work. " To make the case for his superior eye, one need look no further than " There Is No Eye " — which has also occasioned a monograph by the same name (published by powerHouse Books), with an introduction by Greil Marcus, and a companion CD, There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs (Smithsonian Folkways), which includes music by the characters in the book, from anonymous Harlem gospel choirs to a previously unreleased recording of the young Dylan. " The reason I made Music for Photographs was just so all the people who would see the photographs would say, ‘Hey, maybe I should listen to some of that music!’ Of course, what’s happening is that the music is doing even more than the photographs. "

" There Is No Eye: Photographs by John Cohen " opens at the Photographic Resource Center, 602 Commonwealth Avenue, this Friday, January 18, and runs through March 1. Cohen gives a lecture and holds a book signing Friday at 6 p.m.; admission is $5. Call (617) 353-0700.

Issue Date: January 17 - 24, 2002
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