January | February 2002 - Boston Photography Focus

an improvisation on
mus i c and photograp
Leslie K. Brown, Curator, PRC
From his loft on Third Avenue, John immersed himself in the ferment of
the New York City art scene. Soon after he arrived, John had his first exhibition
at Helen Gee’s Limelight. In 1959, his neighbor Robert Frank asked
an shared. experience
Of Dylan, Cohen recalls a moment in 1962, when he “showed me the words
The eye permits us to experience and to document the thing depicted, but is rarely sufficient to convey the deeper meaning of
John to take production stills of the filming of Pull My Daisy. The images
produced during those sessions are among the finest portraits ever of Allen
Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Frank himself. In return, Frank photographed
the New Lost City Ramblers for a series of images that would grace the
covers and liner notes of their albums for years to come. John’s loft became
a crossroads for musicians and artists. An organization of independent photographers,
with members including Lee Friedlander, Gary Winogrand, and
others, was formed there. Southern musicians on their way to and from
performances dropped by, as did Woody Guthrie, Alan Lomax, and others
involved in the folk-music revival.
Throughout the late ’50s and early ’60s, Cohen toured extensively with the
New Lost City Ramblers, sharing the stage with rural musicians like Roscoe
Holcomb and the Stanley Brothers as well as with emerging stars such as
Bob Dylan and Joan Baez. Robert Cantwell, whose When We Were Good
(1996) outstandingly documents the growth and decline of the folk music
revival, noted that during this period the Ramblers “raised the nap of the
revival with newly esotericized discographic sources and a performance style
that sounded as exotic as a Tibetan prayer.”
Also during the late 1950s Cohen took the first of many trips to Peru,
ostensibly to study Andean textile production. In the isolated mountain
region of Q’eros he photographed Indian weavers at work, learning their
vocabulary and rituals and developing a deep appreciation for Andean
music. Years later, Cohen returned to Q’eros to make the films Mountain
Music of Peru (1984) and Carnival in Q’eros (1992). He also recorded and
released two albums of traditional Peruvian music. One of his recordings,
of a young girl singing an Andean huano, was included as a sample of the
sounds of our planet that was sent into space on the Voyager spacecraft.
In 1962, the young Bob Dylan visited for a portrait session on John’s Third
Avenue rooftop. In addition to their common appreciation for traditional
music, the two men shared a close friendship with the ailing Woody Guthrie.
to his new song A Hard Rain’s Gonna Fall. At first it resembled the old ballad
Lord Randall or Where Have You Been Billy Boy. Then it seemed like an
old French symbolist poem to me, and I invited Bob to look at some of
that poetry at my loft. I thought his verses were very strong although I
couldn’t imagine how he would fit them to music. The night of the Cuban
Missile Crisis when it felt like the world was on the brink of atomic collision,
Dylan and I sang together at the Gaslight Café. We did an old Carter
Family song, You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone, not certain if there’d be
anyone left to miss us.”
By the late ’60s the Ramblers were performing in large halls like the Fillmore,
in lineups with supergroups such as The Grateful Dead, the Jefferson
Airplane, and the Jimi Hendrix Experience. Cohen notes that during this
time “a shift of sensibilities set in. The beat generation had prepared the
stage for the counter culture, while the emerging civil rights movement
shook the social landscape… For me, a decade of wide-eyed wandering
with my camera was closing down… So much of what I’d responded to on
a poetic level was becoming entertainment and commerce… Further, there
was my own dissatisfaction with the prospects of ever getting my work seen
on its intended level. By the time the photography galleries were opening
I was somewhere else.” That “somewhere else” was filmmaking.
John shot his first film, a silent two-reeler, on the rooftop with Dylan.
Beginning with his landmark 1962 feature, The High Lonesome Sound,
John has made a total of fifteen documentary films, including important
work on the folk culture of Peru and on the North Carolina musician
Dillard Chandler (The End of an Old Song, 1970). “I made films about
music,” he writes. “And that challenge became so great and transformative
that it became my main effort for the next twenty years.”
Behind the scenes, but central to the picture, is the growth of John’s own family.
In the early 1960s, Cohen married Penny Seeger. The youngest child of
musicologist Charles Seeger and composer Ruth Crawford Seeger, after the
death of her mother when Penny was eight she lived with her half-brother
Pete. A potter by training, she also sang with her siblings Mike and Peggy on
several collections of American folk music, including the classics American
Folk Songs for Christmas and Animal Folk Songs for Children, both of which
drew extensively from their mother’s folk music collection. To support his
family, John took a position as Professor of Visual Arts at the State University
of New York, Purchase, where he worked until his retirement in 1997.
Penny and John raised two children, Rufus and Sonja, in Putnam Country,
New York. In the summer of 1965, when daughter Sonja was still an infant,
her parents brought her to the Newport Folk Festival where the Ramblers
were scheduled to perform. Uncle Pete Seeger opened the program by playing
a cassette of Sonja crying, announcing to the audience, “Here’s the real
folk music.” Sonja, now an adult, has recorded two highly regarded recordings
with composer Dick Connette’s Last Forever project, which draws its
inspiration from American traditional music. Her brother Rufus, also a
musician, works in New Mexico as a textile craftsman. The Cohen family
is featured in both the exhibition, where photographs document their
growth, and in John’s CD, There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs. The CD
presents a musical counterpoint to the exhibition, with songs by many of
the artists whom John photographed, from Rev. Gary Davis and Holcomb
to Dylan and David Amram, and includes pieces by Rufus and Sonja.
In all of John Cohen’s work, his collecting, photographing, filmmaking,
performing, teaching, and parenting, a layer of pure fact (i.e., the thing
depicted) is combined with a layer of meaning conveyed (i.e., the memory
revived or the tradition shared). The eye permits us to experience and to
document the thing depicted, but is rarely sufficient to convey the deeper
meaning of an experience shared. Individual songs or photographs may
describe specific moments in time, and each moment possess a distinct historical
narrative, which we may know by looking.
But experience is not conveyed by looking, or wisdom by simply reading.
This has been a central theme of the New Lost City Ramblers, and it is
implicit in John Cohen’s photographs as well. Meaning and value are conveyed
not through the eye alone, but through the active and generous
bequest of tradition and knowledge from one generation to another, from
one culture to another, from teacher to student, and from parent to child.
This, for me, is the underlying message of John Cohen’s work, and the
deeper narrative of this exhibition: there is no eye because, in the end, it is
the exchange of songs, the sharing of wisdom, the flow of knowledge, and
the gift of life that are important, and not the individual eye/I.
John P. Jacob, Guest Curator
Penobscot, Maine 2001
John Cohen’s photograph, Jack Kerouac Listening to
Himself on the Radio, (seen at left) demonstrates, literally and humorously, the
complex conundrum photographers face when attempting to document subjects
of an auditory nature. Can photography adequately capture a musical
moment by recording the performer, or even a snippet of the performance?
In this short improvisation, an etude if you will, I attempt to cast a wider net
and muse upon Cohen’s fascinating photographs within a larger historical
and philosophical context.
From its inception, photography has been lauded as a method for nature to
reproduce itself. While this was meant primarily in the visual sense — cameras
were often compared to eyes — artists have long attempted to capture the
non-perceptual. Those seeking the abstract saw in sound an equivalent for
the internal non-objective world for which they were searching: an aesthetic
“music of the spheres”. While photography and dance seemed to partner more
readily, painting took especially to music: James Abbott McNeill Whistler
and Wassily Kandinsky titled their canvases symphonies and compositions,
while Piet Mondrian explored the pulsating rhythms of jazz.
This is not to say that photographers did not engage music or its attendant
ideas. In fact, some saw photography as particularly suited for the task.
Cohen alludes to this ability when explaining why he did not become a
painter: “The lens became the center of an equation with the visible world on
one side and the interior world on the other.” Many culture mavens at the
turn of the last century were interested in synaesthesia, or the crossing of various
senses whereby one could see music and hear colors. Such beliefs led to
the invention of fascinating instruments such as the color organ, which
played colors instead of music. Photographer Francis Brugiuère made some
of the earliest abstract photographs and films documenting patterns produced
by such an apparatus. Playing off the Theory of Correspondences so
popular with the Symbolists, Alfred Stieglitz photographed clouds, initially
titling them “Music,” intending that they stand in for mental states akin to
those induced by melodies.
Cohen’s exhibition, book, and accompanying CD provide the viewer (and
listener) with a rare opportunity to see (and to hear) what he has recorded.
Although freezing performers in mid refrain or strum, his photographs are not
silent; instead they sing with beautiful formal relationships. When Cohen’s
photographs don’t show music, they imply it, transforming the viewer into a
makeshift deejay. Images of Cohen’s wife in Peru and a lone figure in a Tenth
Street studio, for example, almost give rise to a melancholy dirge.
One would think that photography’s use of a negative and its ability to be
repeated and reinterpreted much like a musical score would make these arts
close cousins. Ansel Adams’s much-repeated comparison of the negative to
sheet music and its printing to performance alludes to this attribute. Quite
the opposite, many photographers even go so far as to destroy their negatives
so no one can translate them. Ironically or aptly, Cohen’s re-discovery of
Left to right: 1. John Cohen, Woody Guthrie at Cooper Union. Courtesy of the artist and
Deborah Bell, New York. 2. John Cohen, Third Avenue, New York City, 1962. Courtesy of the
artist and Deborah Bell, New York. 3. John Cohen, Philadelphia, 1961. Courtesy of the artist
and Deborah Bell, New York. 4. John Cohen, Jack Kerouac listening to himself on the radio.
Courtesy of the artist and Deborah Bell, New York. 5. John Cohen, Harlem, New York City,
1954. Courtesy of the artist and Deborah Bell, New York. 6. John Cohen, Harlem, New York
City, 1954. Courtesy of the artist and Deborah Bell, New York.
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