HASTED HUNT is pleased to announce MARK COHEN – TRUE COLOR, photographs shot in the late 1970’s, printed recently as color dye transfers and shown here for the first time in New York.

Mark Cohen is part of the generation of street photographers that includes Robert Frank, William Klein, and Lee Friedlander although Cohen photographed exclusively in and around his hometown Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. This work is distinguished by Cohen’s distinctive close up style, with its graphic boldness, and by his seemingly deep regard for his neighbors and their children. The deeply saturated colors in this work have the feel of 1970’s yet seem contemporary.

Cohen finds odd and affecting suburban enigmas. His special view of kids, for example, shows in the shared conspiracies in “Boy in Yellow Shirt Smoking” and in the surreptitiousness of the onlooker in “Legs and Boy in Pool” with a small boy in a diving mask comically glimpsing at a woman. These are Wilkes-Barre kids caught playing and posing in photographs that feel like the best stills from home movies. Look at “Karate Stance” and “Girl with Bat and Ball”. Cohen also finds quirky drama in simple details like a bare hand clasped with “One Red Glove”, and “Small Hand by Yellow Shirt” captures a kind of rough and tumble camaraderie simply with planes of color and a child’s fingers.

TRUE COLOR was originally commissioned by the George Eastman House, which has a large holding of the artist’s work. Cohen has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and he has work in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum, the San Francisco MoMA, and the Fogg Museum, Cambridge, MA.

The prints in this exhibition are from a portfolio of thirty color dye transfers from the G&I Studio in New York City. These are a collaboration between Cohen and the celebrated printers, Guy Stricherz and Irene Malli, who have also been responsible for the William Eggleston dye transfer prints since the late 1990’s.