There are found objects, but are there found photographs?  Some of Mark Cohen’s photographs on display now at Bruce Silverstein seem like just that, the sorts of shots you find on your camera, interspersed between the real ones, if you carry it around in your purse for too long.  They are obscured, ambiguous views, uncomfortably close, of you’re not really sure what.  I think it must be very difficult for a professional photographer to capture images like this, that seem to be drained of all formal conventions, and of any discernible subject.

There are photos here of corners, cracks in the sidewalk, paper bags, and lines of ants.  Some have people in them, severely cropped, so that we recognize only a kneecap or a hand, and don’t get a sense of them as characters.  The images are highly-calibrated accidents, like Gary Winogrand’s.  But, unlike Winogrand’s, they’re myopic; they don’t open themselves to expose a small real-world drama.  And while they’re assiduously crafted and printed they’re rough; they don’t settle easily into abstraction, like Edward Weston’s.  They have a strong pull.  Each print, about twenty inches wide, holds your attention the way a larger painting would.  The photos call you into their fractured, unpretty worlds.