JohnCohen

John Cohen (1932–2019) was an American photographer, filmmaker and musician whose work moved fluidly between documenting the New York art and folk-music worlds of the 1950s and traveling repeatedly to the Peruvian Andes and the American South to record traditional cultures. Born in Queens and trained at Yale, where he studied painting, Cohen became a founding member of the New Lost City Ramblers in 1958, the string band that introduced urban folk audiences to the recordings of rural Southern musicians of the 1920s and 1930s.

As a photographer, Cohen was embedded in the downtown New York scene of the late 1950s, working as an assistant to Robert Frank on the Beat Generation film Pull My Daisy and photographing figures including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, Franz Kline and a young Bob Dylan around Greenwich Village and the Cedar Tavern.

In 1956, drawn by an archaeology course at Yale, Cohen traveled to Peru to study Andean weaving for his master’s thesis; he would return to Peru eight times over the following decades, photographing and filming the Q’ero people and the wider highland culture of the region, including the celebrated document Macchu, Tussec Dancers, Peru (1956).

Cohen also directed influential documentary films, including The High Lonesome Sound (1963), centered on the Appalachian singer Roscoe Holcomb, and The End of an Old Song, about the ballad singer Dillard Chandler. He taught visual arts at SUNY Purchase College for twenty-five years and continued exhibiting and performing into his eighties, before his death in Putnam Valley, New York, in 2019.