Tall Socks by Mark Cohen

Photographs taken in New York more than 50 years ago by Mark Cohen will be published for the first time in Tall Socks. In July 1973, Cohen spent a month living in an NYU dorm room while taking part in a film production workshop. Because his daily classes were short, he used the rest of his time to walk the city with his camera. Only a small number of the pictures were printed then; most remained unseen—known only as negatives—until now.

New York in the 1970s was notorious for high crime rates, social disorder, an unsafe subway, and a declining quality of life. Economic stagnation had hit the city hard, and many middle-class residents had moved to the suburbs. These conditions appear in Cohen’s photographs through the graffiti, litter, and ruin on the streets, yet the images also show a city that is alive and in motion.

Although the book’s sequencing follows no formal narrative, the rhythm of the pictures evokes the experience of walking through a place where residents seem perpetually in transit, with Cohen moving unobtrusively among them. From block to block and step to step, change registers in passing details and quick impressions. Some photographs carry an undercurrent of threat—the glare of a stranger, the menace of subway stations—while others find humour and joy in a child’s tall socks, a woman with peacock feathers, an incongruous elephant, or a girl carrying a plank of wood across a cobblestoned street.

Cohen has been taking photographs since he was 14 and is best known for work made in his native Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, where he would step outside his door and begin. He didn’t need to travel, because the streets offered endless possibilities and variations each day, and the same approach guided his short time in New York: he just had to walk. His style is singular, shaped by holding the camera at hip level and photographing intuitively, often close to his subjects. The result is an unusual perspective, as if seen from a child’s height, attentive to overlooked objects and angles, cropping figures, and peering curiously into doorways and down streets—making the familiar feel both fresh and strange.