I really enjoyed Mark Cohen's exhibit for a number of reasons. The method he used to obtain most of the pictures was unusual in its aggressiveness; not only was he approaching random people in the street and taking their pictures (which he did at such a close range that he was frequently invading their personal space; many of the pictures are just of necks or legs or hands), but he also frequently used a flash, adding to the “in your face” element of his work.

These decisions are interesting because they don’t really document the subject in a distanced, objective way. They aren’t average moments in an average person’s life; Cohen creates these moments in the actual act of taking a photograph, making the subject of each one the person or people’s reactions to being photographed. I wondered while looking at these pictures if many of these were just one off, random pictures he took, or whether he took several pictures so that he would have a better chance at capturing something interesting.

In terms of the content, besides documenting the moment of taking a picture, formally the pictures are all about the details. The subjects, ranging from surprised faces to clutched handbags, are in sharp focus, the backgrounds are blurred. Also, random visual phenomena, either from nature (such as a rain drop on a lens) or a result of of the photographic process (such as a strange reflection of the flash in glass), are important making each picture unique and interesting, and similarly make the subject about the moment or action of photography, rather than what was there before.