In her photographic studio of industrial interior design, Laura Cohen (Mexico City, 1956) alchemy of her emotions, creates images in which the formal composition simultaneously reveals states of matter and soul, artifices to converge the natural forms and the created by the human being, just as the monumental scale architectural geometry does with objects of precision, or an undulating female body does it in the confines of a fish tank.
Immersed in the clean lines and neutral colors of her place of creation, the artist seems one more element of her compositional games. There, with his sharp blue eyes, evokes key moments of his career for which this Thursday, August 23 was recognized with the Medal of Photographic Merit, at the 19th National Photographic Meeting, which takes place in Pachuca, Hidalgo, Ciudad de Light and Silver.
Her father was an amateur of photography, with a Rolleiflex she took family portraits that she later revealed in the dark room, while she, just an eight-year-old girl, sat in that space that seemed like another world, a world of red sky and air. loaded with chemicals: methol, sodium sulfite, borax. That experience created a familiarity with the craft, but it was in adolescence that he discovered that it could be a means of expression for his artistic soul.
Laura Cohen comments that school lessons could become frustrating for her because of her dyslexia, however, she was fortunate to take a class in which poetry should be interpreted through a photographic image, "that I loved, and from there I I grabbed the photograph. " But the paths of vocation are not always in a straight line, as he proved.
In the mid-70s he traveled to the United States to study industrial design and photography at the Institute of Design in Chicago, where he ended up suffering from technical drawing, but valuing the foundations of the photographic technique that he was taught. In his career in graphic design at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana, he also felt like a fish out of water.
The definitive place for his training was found at the Rhode Island School of Design, in Providence, New York, where he had among other masters the late Paul Krot, an eccentric inventor of chemical products "who painted his carrot-colored hair with developer "and creator of a system that currently supplies more than 800 darkrooms in US colleges and universities with chemicals and technical support; as well as the renowned photographer and filmmaker Wendy Snyder MacNeil, "with her we had almost psychoanalytic sessions, she had the ability to see our souls through our photographs.
"In my view, photography is no longer photography, but a means of expression. From the digital revolution, everyone can take an image and everything is photographed. That pushed me to try to translate aspects, elements that draw my attention in everyday life, abstract them from emotions and feelings, to that two-dimensional voice that is photography.
"Things that affect me or are very deep, I translate from the imaginary that I have invented and give them an image," he says as he places a photographic sequence on the table: a whitish vapor that escapes lightly, frame by frame. For her it is an allegory of how the detachment of the soul should be, an idea that came to her mind at the root of her father's death.
After his project dedicated to spas, images in which the viewer can recreate in the abstract design of lines formed by the shadows of a chair or in the curvatures of a floor that are confused with the undulating shapes of a swimmer, Laura Cohen He emigrated to the studio to juxtapose spheres, insects, drawing instruments, projections, still life, to the cultural forms that resemble them.
In their projects, a kind of puzzle about the architecture of living beings and inanimate objects, the extremities of a rhinoceros beetle recall the lines of a geodesic dome, a night moth to a flare, a flying cricket to the blades of a fan, the arm of a trunk to an ace of clubs, a transporter to the pyramidal silhouette of the Insignia Tower or the curvígrafo to the parallel lines that form the Satellite Towers.
"I believe in the preciousness of photography: focusing, mediating light, that's also why I continue to make prints on silver / gelatin paper. In my work as an author everything is with a film and sometimes I complement it with digital to perfect the image. In the photograph you need to have a very clear idea of ??what you are looking for, of what you want to say and that is what we were obliged to do with the analogue camera, to choose ".
"I think that to create a personal photographic technique it is necessary to have knowledge of the perfect chemistry, only that way you get the result you want in the image. That goes hand in hand with knowing how to listen to our interior, with the necessary tools that voice can come out and achieve a language of its own ", says this artist who has contributed to the reformulation of photography as an art form in itself.
Source: inah.gob.mx
