Earth with Meaning: the Photographs of Alan Cohen, curated by Mary Jane Jacob, is currently on display at the Gregg Museum of Art & Design at the Talley Student Center. The display showcases the work of the former N.C . State student over the course of the past 17 years.
Cohen ‘makes visible the unseen’ in places marked by history or the processes of natural events. He aims his cameras downward to record the exact spots that permeate memory. In his photos, such as ‘Boston Massacre-Start of the American Revolution’ photographed in 2003, he seeks to capture locations that hold historical importance as they are now.
Cohen, a B.S . in nuclear engineering, would have continued his doctoral program in thermodynamics if not for a chance trip with his wife to Germany. However, this defining moment in his life came in 1992, and turned his interest to photography.
“I was at Duchan ,” Cohen said, “a suburb of Munich. I was at the first Nazi death camp.”
“To look into the many layers that a photograph has to offer depends a lot on what the artist has put on a wall,” Roger Manley, the director of the Gregg Museum of Art & Design, said, “and what you have in yourself to connect with it.”
Cohen plays with his image, Manley explained, pointing out a picture of a Nazi execution site in Oslo, Norway.
“Without this background of the place,” Manley said, “if you simply look at the image, it does not make much sense. It merely looks like a field of flowers, and some rocks. It is really the remains of the gas chambers. [Cohen] shows the passage of time, and nature’s way of healing horrors of the past. The flowers signify this.”
The picture of Fort de Douaumont in Verdun, France and a picture of the aisle of temple of the Buddha’s first sermon taken at Sarnath , India also need some background for understanding, according to Manley.
“These trenches that are covered with soil and grass,” Manley pointed out, “were where men lived during the World War I. Their feet is said to have rotted from standing in the mud.”
Cohen was struck by this imbalance between what you know about a place and what you can and cannot see during that first trip to Germany.
“Standing in the middle of where barracks had been,” Cohen said, “I looked at the passenger of a passing bus. He looked back at me. I began work in this fissure between what I sensed and what I could not show.
“This exhibition requires a lot of thinking,” Manley said. “What may seem important, you can’t always see. And what you see may not be unimportant, either. There is a lot of sadness in this show.
The exhibition has not yet had many visitors, according to Manley.
“People come to an exhibition and expect to see something happy or something pretty,” Manley said. “The aisle of the temple of Buddha’s first sermon may not interest or excite everyone. Even when a class comes to the exhibition, I try to get them excited. But, if they don’t, it’s not really their fault. Everyone has different experiences. Even if Buddha were here, he would simply go a ‘Burr’ on this.”
Still, the exhibit is a showcase not only of what sad things have happened throughout history, but of how those places and locales have changed. Through his work, Cohen hopes to have captured images worth the time to look at.
“With some knowledge of places in these pictures,” Manley said, “you can sense a presence. You are able to use pieces of shared knowledge to look deeply into these sites.”
The Earth with Meaning exhibit will remain in Gregg until the end of the semester. Students interested in photography or history should find the time to see the world through Cohen’s lens.
