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Updated: December 2002 THERE IS NO EYE "Up against these eyeless pictures, those of Evans, Frank, Levitt, and Bourke-White can seem almost propagandistic. That is, they make arguments; you are aware that the photographer wants to tell you something, to convince you of something, to lead you to accept a certain point of view. Here there is no point of view. There is something else; I don't know what to call it, so I won't try." —The New York Times "Arts & Leisure," excerpt of introduction by Greil Marcus with photo "The book's name, 'There is No Eye' is a fragment from Bob Dylan's writings. Mr. Cohen says he chose the title 'to make people think about photographs and images. I can't say it clearly, because it's not meant to be said clearly. My purpose is to force people to think. If there is no eye, then what us there? What is being communicated? Something beyond the eye, some impulse beyond hearing and seeing that unifies all these things. What i's about is beyond that.'" —The New York Times "Westchester" section "...it took Mr. Cohen time to recognize the value of his body of work—which includes portraits of [Bob] Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Red Grooms, and other artists active in the Downtown scene of the 50's and 60's, as well as glimpses of life in the Appalachians and the Andes... "There is No Eye" ... surveys a career guided by a wide-ranging curiosity." —The New York Times "Arts & Leisure," interview with John Cohen by Blake Eskin with photo The New York Times interview was picked up by the International Herald Tribune "While John Cohen is a very fine photographer...it is his subject matter that clobbers you, before you fully register his artistry....Possibly the most striking subject in the book is is the indomitable Roscoe Holcomb, an oak tree of a man, with a long, grave face—William S. Burroughs if he'd gone to divinity school—who lives in a house up a dirt track that might have been built by his ancestors and hold his banjo in his hands permanently tattooed with work grime. Holcomb does get serious competition from Andrea Quispe Chura of Q'eros, Peru, a wildly beautiful woman whose facial planes suggest some kind of radical geometry, and from Woody Gurthie, face like a Puritan judge, hairstyle a cloud of ringlets cantilevered onto an otherwise buzz-cut scalp. The sculptor Mary Frank, then married to Robert, is the incarnation of beatnik glamour, all abundant features and hair and huge eyes and no makeup needed, ever. Gregory Corso, the street urchin, mugs in every picture and turns it into sketch comedy; Jack Kerouac appears on the verge of tears or tantrum in his pictures and hauls in canned thunder and organ arpeggios. Someone kisses Grace Hartigan on the forehead, and she laughs with such pure happiness you want to cut out her face and keep it in your wallet. Bob Dylan, worried and smoking and leaning against the wall with his hand in his hair, makes you wonder how you missed the early Goddard movie from which the shot ought to be taken." —Luc Sante for Bookforum "The current roots music revival has its high-profiile elements, notably the now triple-platinum, mullti-award-winning soundtrack of 'O Brother, Where Art Thou?' and PBS's 'American Roots Music' series. But it still has a long way to go to reach the impact of folk revival in the late '50s and early '60s, when a new generation embraced the traditional repertoire and styles of fast-disappearing American folk cultures. A case in point: John Cohen, whose New Lost city Ramblers were the most important and influential first generation revival band. Cohen was also a photographer and documentary filmmaker, a folklorist and a teacher, and all those roles coalesce in There is No Eye..." —Washington Post "...John Cohen's new book of photographs...chronicles an era in American musical and bohemian culture. Cohen, 69, has intertwined careers as a musician, professor, photographer, painter, filmmaker and ethnomusicologist.... The title of Cohen's book and an accompanying compact disc, 'There is No Eye,' echoes a line from [Bob] Dylan's notes to his 1965 album, 'Highway 61 Revisited.' In scantly punctuated prose, Dylan wrote, 'you are right john cohen ... I cannot say the word eye anymore ... there is no eye.'... To aficionados of the American tradition of fiddle and banjo stylings known as old-time music, Cohen is best known as a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers.... The New Lost City Ramblers influenced more than a generation of folk music buffs. 'Deadheads' who pore over the lyrics to the Grateful Dead have speculated that the rock group's 1970 song 'Uncle John's Band' referred to John Cohen and the Ramblers." —Reuters, Feature story with photo "...an impressive collection of photographs and memories from Cohen..." —Rolling Stone "John Cohen is a hoping machine. He's also a photographer, filmmaker, and teacher....I met John a long, long time ago. He was one of the first young guys to come a 'visiting' our house in the 50's, on the weekends when my dad was home from the hospital, way before the other (now famous) guy did. John was so kind to my father, always playing him music, offering help whenever, wherever, however. His magnificent photo of my dad graces the cover of his new book as well as the accompanying CD." —Nora Guthrie "Cohen is a photographer whose talents are put to excellent use in part because he finds himself in the right place at the right time, recording shared qualities with such widely dispersed locales as Greenwich Village's 'Beat' scene, high-altitude Andean villages, and storefront churches. Cohen was a fixture in the 1950s folk-music revival...who also happened to have a camera and a deeply inquisitive disposition at his service. The lyrical and moving work that resulted is collected for the first tim in this monograph. The most appealing byproduct of Cohen's densely textured black-and-white images i s an ecumenical message that people everywhere will find ways to interpret and adapt to life by means both creative and life-giving. This message is visible in the slightly askew beer bottle in the pocket of a faceless Peruvian trumpeter, the artist Red Grooms ferrying a large painting across Third Avenue in a pram, and production stills from Robert frank's beat opus Pull My Daisy. Most famous faces make an appearance: the crumpled forehead of Jack Kerouac, an impish Bob Dylan, a diffident Franz Kline, and a tousled, aging Woody Guthrie. However, the real meat of this fine and inspiring work is the depiction of unknown toilers in Cohen's family of man." —Library Journal "...he picked up a tape deck and a camera and hit the road, recording and photographing the music makers he met. A double-barreled retrospective of John Cohen's work has been released, a CD and book called 'There is No Eye.'" —"All Things Considered," NPR interview "There was something in what he came to call the 'high lonesome sound' which drew John Cohen to the back porch of a coal town in Kentucky, and something in the sound of those gospel meetings in Harlem in the late fifties. There was also something high or lonesome in the mountain music of the people he met in Peru back then, and something else entirely in the slap and sting of the beat poets like Jack Kerouac. Mix in the early days of Bob Dylan, with the final days of Woody Guthrie, bring along the cameras and the tape recorders of John Cohen and you have packed all you'll need for a journey into the roots of roots music, where characters like Reverend Gary Davis, Hazel Dickens, and Roscoe Holcomb touch the strings and hit the original notes of that high lonesome sound." —"The Connection," NPR Interview "John Cohen is nothing if not extraordinary. Born in Queens in 1932, he's a painter, draughtsman, photographer, musician, filmmaker, educator, archivist, and documentairan (although he's probably prefer not to be referred to by at least some of these descriptions). Over the course of a long and varied life he has devoted himself to discovering, preserving and expanding the artistic canon that surrounds what has come to be known as American Roots music....Cohen is a polymath and an iconoclast, whose work is retrospectively gathered together in a new book..." —The Fader "Renowned as a musician—he founded the celebrated old-time string band The New Lost City Ramblers—and as a photographer, documentary filmmaker and folklorist, Cohen has distilled a lifetime of creativity into a multi-media compendium, There is No Eye." —Smithsonian "Cohen photographed many key figures in the American Beat and folk music scene—Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Frank. Elizabeth Cotten, and many of their brethren—at the height of their creativity in the late 1950s and early '60s." —American Photo "Distilled from a lifetime of travel, play, artistry, and human involvement, Cohen's images deliver disparate views of the Peruvian Andes, bluegrass musician, the streets of New Haven and Philadelphia, and famed nights inside New York's Cedar Bar with notable such as Jack Kerouac, Lary Rivers, Robert Frank, Franz Kline, Grace Hartigan, and Allan Kaprow, among many others. Images of recording sessions with Woody Guthrie, Doc Watson, and Pete Seeger feature as well, rounding out the collection as a smart snapshot of midcentury's cutting edges." —DoubleTake "John Cohen may not be a household name but his name is in many households. It's right there on the back of Bob Dylan's 1965 LP, Highway 61 Revisited... Such anonymous uniquely fits Cohen well. Since the '50s, he's been something of a roots-music Zelig—a renaissance man humbly documenting America's folk renaissance... But it's through his work as a photgorapher—where he 'nestles in the middle without being a part of it—that Cohen has buried himself deepest into the public consciousness." —Time Out New York "Cohen's photographs, as intimate and impromptu as the musicians' jams, bounce seamlessly between the 1950s New York cityscapes and the rural South, and back to the lives of the Beats when everyone was young, pretty, and unburdened by legend. The photographs are like Frank's 'The Americans'...and it can take a couple of passes to realize how remarkable they nonetheless are. The package—book and CD together—is like having a best friend who has been collecting records and attending concerts for 50 years share his best cuts and snapshots with you." —San Jose Mercury News "At 70, John Cohen could well illustrate Georges Braque's comment that as we age, our very lives become works of art." —The Old-Time Herald "Like an ancient minstrel himself, Cohen is out guide to the places rarely traveled in photographs, going out into the wider world, and bringing back the richness of culture through his singular vision." —Black & White "If you stand on a street corner long enough, you'll meet just about everybody. In a way, that's what Cohen has been doing for the past 50 years, whil giving people a chance to learn something of the music that has plyed a large part in shaping society." —The Ottawa Citizen "As viewers, we want the motion that seems so much a part of Cohen's unsentimental pictures to sweep us into its dynamic, even if we don't know what's going on. Whether it's Kerouac listening to himself on the radio in 1959, or Alfred Leslie carrying an armful of unframed paintings from a trailer on a New York City street, or two girls with their backsides turned to the camera on a dirt road in Vicco, KY..." —San Francisco Bay Guardian "At 69, John Cohen describes his life as a never-ending search. A search that has led him to take countless photographs, record countless musicians, make film and play in his own band. But just what is he searching for? 'If I knew what it was for—if I knew why I did all this work—I probably wouldn't have to do it,' says Cohen..." —Sacramento Bee "What makes Cohen's look back more than a jog down memory lane is that it points so clearly to our present. Cohen's musical interests—rural American folk music, bluegrass, blues, gospel—are the same styles enjoying a revival." —Boston Herald "There is No Eye is like a beautifully woven tapestry, richly textured. It finds a common unspoken thread in his specific life experiences." —On the Tracks "Cohen's concept is that photographs allowed him to get closer to musicians and so offer us a better understanding of the music. This collection is Cohen's witness statement to his life and times... The pictures are a fascinating document." —BBC Radio 2 "In an odd way, though, the rest of the world is coming around to John Cohen's way of seeing and hearing—only now, 50 years after he first beckoned us to look and listen. " —Boston Phoenix "Cohen's black-and-white photographs of poor appalachian farmer-musicians—stern faces, dirt-caked hands, banjos—say more than his accompanying text ever could about the place, geographical and spiritual, that they inhabit." —Mojo "John Cohen has contributed to the folk revival as a musician, filmmaker, photographer and producer." —Playboy "...a guided tour of the worlds of outsider artists, poets, and musicians. Cohen's lyrical stories of what he encountered augment his stirring, quiet photographs taken during the past 50 years." —Studio Photography and Design "...a new book of photos of roots musicians taken over the course of almost 50 years by folk musician and longtime member of the New Lost City Ramblers, John Cohen. "—Guitar World Acoustic "A prolific writer himself, Cohen still found time to teach photography for decades, having first been a working photographer—a quiet chronicler of the music scene in which he's thrived, of the legends he's known, of the Beat poets scene and more, in photos that 'caught him,' as he puts it." —No Depression, 4 page feature "Although Cohen is best known as a preserver, promoter, and performer of traditional American music, he's a true renaissance man.... There is No Eye contains his stunning photographs of such iconic figures as Jack Kerouac, Bob Dylan, Franz Kline, and Woody Gutherie, as well as haunting imaes of nameless folk from the hollers of Kentucky to the mountains of Peru." —alibi.com "His photos speak volumes about their subjects.... a must-have photo book." —Stop Smiling "From the holiest churches of Harlem to the Peruvian Andes' peasant villages, photographer/filmmaker/musician/producer John Cohen has, since the 1950s, sought both the indigenous and the avant-garde. Convinced that neither recordings nor film alone could adequately capture what lay before him, he used both mediums." —Goldmine "...John Cohen compiled song for the blues, folk and hillbilly musicians he shot; the stark beauty of the music matches the mood of his photos." —RollingStone.com More Press Coverage !! |
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