She photographed diversity within a theme, such as all sorts of classrooms: at culinary schools, for veterinarians, flight schools with plane simulators, at beauty schools. A vitrine in the exhibition groups work of Cohen’s that looks especially Evans-esque: “the visual influence is striking,” Pfaller says. “It’s not about any formalistic caprices or mannerisms… It’s really about showing the immense breadth of her work and all the places she covered.”Ĭohen’s attraction to interiors aligned her with the tradition of Walker Evans, curator William Jenkins wrote in 1974, especially his 1966 book Message from the Interior, which “read like a blueprint of what Cohen was interested in,” Pfaller remarks. “You cannot really say that she did typologies,” says Matthias Pfaller, co-curator of the exhibition with Florian Ebner.

Although the show highlights recurring themes within her work, these recurrences didn’t narrow or even structure her approach. A selection of her images of interiors will be presented at the Centre Pompidou in Paris this spring, focusing on her début in the 1970s, and the evolution of her artistic practice over the following two decades. Two decades of the late American photographer’s work reflect on her passion for the performance of everyday spaces, and the ambiguity of human interference within themĪmerican-born Lynne Cohen’s photographic oeuvre (1944-2014) was vast and bold.

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