Photography is often described as a way of looking at the world. For Mark Cohen, this gaze does not rise toward the horizon; it can crawl. It brushes against the ground, grazes edges, slips beneath the steps of passersby. At Galerie du jour agnès b., the exhibition “Low Ideas” brings together around forty recent gelatin silver prints—images taken not in the flow of the street, but in its residues. Bread crumbs, a metal grate, a discarded puzzle, a ticket folded into a zigzag. These are real fragments, torn from the city like a pebble picked up off the pavement. Cohen is not searching for narrative—he is searching for impact. “I am basically a surrealist action photographer,” he says, claiming a direct, instinctive photographic gesture.
The point is not to explain, but to make something appear. “There is no conversation. I don’t want to have to explain myself,” he states. “I just use the people in the street in the most ephemeral way possible.” Everything in his visual vocabulary functions as an extraction: a cut carved into a crowd, a detail pulled from the surface of the world. When he holds the camera at arm’s length, without looking through the viewfinder, it is not provocation—it is a strategy of capture. For more than fifty years he has walked the streets, from Wilkes-Barre to Mexico, tracking arms, wrists, truncated torsos, legs like moving lines. His photography, almost tactile, rejects narration. Each image resembles an urban DNA sample: raw, enigmatic, with no instructions.
In “Low Ideas,” these samples shift downward. Where he once sculpted crowds into human fragments, he now photographs from the ground—an inversion of the camera’s anchoring, as if the eye had slid down to the asphalt. Waste becomes wordplay, as the introductory text puts it: a paper cylinder, an empty cup, a damaged piece of bread, a serrated ticket… Mark Cohen does not pursue metaphor but the collision of reality with the act of photographing. Surrealism, for him, does not float in the imagination: it settles in the visual shock between an object and light, between a discarded item and the pavement. Faced with Zig Zag Receipt (2024), shown in Paris for the first time, one does not see a scene—one reads a rhythm, a kind of sequence laid flat on asphalt, like an improvised score.
Here, no documentary logic links Cohen’s images: they coexist like graphic notes. The artist, now 82, has defended this approach since his beginnings. “You don’t take pictures. You make them by attacking a situation,” he says. This is the core of “Low Ideas.” In the gallery space, the prints appear light, almost modest. But if one pauses, letting the eye descend, their impact becomes clear. You do not contemplate a scene: you lean forward, you lower yourself, you crawl. You look for the trace, the almost-nothing. In this marginal territory, Cohen pursues his search for a reality stripped of spectacle—a low altitude where photography never stops provoking.
“Low Ideas,” by Mark Cohen, is on view at Galerie du jour agnès b. in Paris until January 4, 2026.
