Biographical Note
John Cohen was born in 1932 in Queens, New York, to Russian Jewish parents, Israel Cohen and Sonya (Shack) Cohen, and raised on Long Island. Cohen earned a bachelor of fine arts (1951) and completed a master of fine arts (1957), both from Yale University. As an undergraduate, Cohen studied painting with artist and educator, Josef Albers, but shifted his focus to photography after being exposed to Robert Frank's documentary photography work. He studied with modernist photographer Herbert Matter, who Cohen assisted on a project documenting performances of gospel music in Harlem. Cohen's deepening artistic sense, combined with learning about weaving customs of Peru through an archeology course, would lead him to travel to the Peruvian Andes, write his master's thesis on their weaving customs, and commence his lifelong involvement documenting Andean communities.
Cohen was also an active musician. While at Yale, he organized music festivals and continued his work presenting concerts later in New York City during the emergence of the folk revival. In 1958, Cohen founded the New Lost City Ramblers, along with Mike Seeger and Tom Paley (replaced by Tracy Schwarz in 1962). The New Lost City Ramblers was an old time string band that embraced a respect for rural Appalachian traditions and canons, while infusing originality and making the music accessible to folk revival audiences in New York City and throughout the United States. The band created more than 20 albums together.
While living in New York City during the late 1950s, Cohen became involved with the Avant Garde and Abstract Expressionist art world. Robert Frank, Cohen's next door neighbor, enlisted Cohen as still photographer of Pull My Daisy, the influential Beat Generation film directed by Frank, written by Jack Kerouac, and featuring Allen Ginsberg, Peter Orlovsky, Gregory Corso, David Amram, and others. In addition to documenting the artistic Avant Garde art and literary world of his New York neighborhood, Cohen photographed significant folk musicians, such as Woody Guthrie and a young Bob Dylan. He was a founding director of the Friends of Old Time Music, a group including Ralph Rinzler and Izzy Young, which presented 14 concerts of traditional musicians to New York audiences for the first time. Performers included Roscoe Holcomb, the Stanley Brothers, Maybelle Carter, Doc Watson, Mississippi John Hurt, and Dock Boggs. In addition to using his musical and personal connections for booking artists, John did the artwork and design for posters and fliers for many of the concerts.
In 1965, Cohen married Penelope (Penny) Seeger (1943-1993), daughter of the well-known musicians and musicologists Ruth Crawford Seeger and Charles Seeger. Penny was a singer and musician, as were her siblings, Barbara, Peggy, Mike (John Cohen's band mate in the New Lost City Ramblers), and half brother, Pete. Cohen and Seeger had two children, Sonya (1965-2015) and Rufus.
Cohen's fascination with Appalachian and Andean culture inspired him to take many collecting trips to the Southern U.S. and to Peru, where he recorded, photographed, and produced films that presented the people and traditions in their cultural contexts. His work reflected his artistic sense and aesthetic. Cohen was a prolific documentary filmmaker, ultimately creating seventeen films through the course of his career, including The High Lonesome Sound, The End of an Old Song, Q'eros: The Shape of Survival, Mountain Music of Peru, and Visions of Mary Frank. Cohen also produced, compiled, and wrote liner notes for recordings of Appalachian music, such as An Untamed Sense of Control, High Atmosphere: Ballads and Banjo Tunes from Virginia and North Carolina, Dark Holler, and Back Roads to Cold Mountain.
Cohen guest lectured at several colleges beginning in 1968, before becoming the Area Head in photography at the State University of New York at Purchase from 1972 to 1997. There he taught courses on photography, drawing, and film. His photographs have been exhibited at galleries and museums across the United States and in Peru and England. The There Is No Eye exhibit of Cohen's photographs, organized by the Photographic Resource Center in Boston, MA, traveled to 11 museums and yielded a book of photographs and a Smithsonian Folkways album, There Is No Eye: Music for Photographs. Cohen's photographs have been published in numerous curated books, and in periodicals. Cohen died in 2019.