Exhibition Hall 1977

Lynne Cohen's photograph captures a staged scene, a kind of non-place, rendered in stark black and white. It feels like a stage set, waiting for a play that never begins. The composition is what gets me. The chairs, like characters, are arranged with this eerie symmetry. Notice how Cohen plays with texture – the velvety dark backdrop against the patterned fabric of the chairs, the grainy quality of the print itself. It’s a very material thing, photography, and Cohen is reminding us of that. The light source, a single circle at the back of the image, feels artificial. Is it a sun, a moon, an eclipse? The ambiguity is delicious. Cohen's photographs often explore these liminal spaces, places that are neither here nor there. Think of Bernd and Hilla Becher’s typologies, but with a surreal, unsettling twist. It’s this tension between the real and the constructed that makes her work so compelling, and so very strange.