Charles Cohen

Lives and works in New York, NY, USA

Artist statement

As a photographer influenced by anthropology, I see the conversation between artist and viewer as a metaphor for the relationship between Self and Other. I often use hi-resolution, large-format photography to create experiences in the present tense that dialog with a viewer through the depiction of architectural structures, language and the explicit absence of narrative and narrator. I document windows, signs, doors and bits of text in reference to the spatial planes, like thresholds, that separate individuals. The artifacts of contemporary culture, stripped of function and reduced to form and category, serve as departure points for an exercise towards collective consciousness. In the way that ethnographers blur the line between participation and observation in their method, I seek to erode the lines between the dualities on which our culture defines itself—“nature and artifice,” “presence and absence,” “original and copy,” “self and other.” Between modalities, we can transform the subject/object dichotomy into an embrace of an elastic, universal Self. Most works are available for purchase at www.artfare.com/charles-cohen.

Artwork