Mark Cohen – Low Ideas

November 7, 2025 – January 4, 2026

Opening reception on Thursday, 6 November 2025, from 6-9 p.m.

With Low Ideas, American photographer Mark Cohen, a major and radical figure in street photography, opens a new chapter in his work. Seven years after his first exhibition at Galerie du Jour, he returns with a series that continues his exploration of fragments of reality, urban debris, and the city as an unconscious stage. Around forty silver gelatin prints will be shown in Paris for the first time.

Seeing Without Aiming

For Mark Cohen, photography is not about planning but about gesture. His method is fast, instinctive, frontal. In this recent series, his perspective has shifted. Where he once photographed at adult or child height: torsos, arms, cropped legs, his gaze now rests at ground level, as if the eye had descended to the pavement itself.
For over fifty years, Mark Cohen has roamed the streets with his camera in search of fleeting details, abandoned objects, and fragments of bodies. An empty cup, a folded leaf, a discarded piece of chicken become subjects in themselves. The images he captures extract samples of reality from the urban flow, like visual notes that obey no documentary logic.
Low Ideas explores this low-lying topography of residue and traces. It forms a poetics of
almost nothing: a photography without horizon, without figures, yet rich in visual tension
and intensity.

A Discreet, Urban, and Tactile Surrealism

Mark Cohen describes himself as a surrealist action photographer. This surrealism is neither dreamlike nor metaphorical: it is direct, physical, rooted in the collision of reality with the photographic gesture.

It arises from chance encounters, between a piece of bread and a sidewalk, debris and light, packaging and a puddle. As with Atget or Brassaï, it is the city’s margins, its debris, and its silent surfaces that become sources of apparition.

For Cohen, refuse becomes rebus. His images do not tell stories: they allow things to
emerge. Each photograph is a visual fragment, a suspended notation. This form of
surrealism takes shape in the stillness of the everyday and the density of detail..

Low Ideas brings together around forty prints, most of them previously unseen, produced in recent years and exhibited for the very first time in Paris. This is neither a constructed series nor a linear narrative, but rather a constellation of autonomous images, each isolating a fragment of reality, detached from the ordinary flow.