Lynne Cohen

Early Life and Education

Lynne Cohen was born and raised in Racine, Wisconsin. She attended the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 1962 to 1964, then transferred to the Slade School of Fine Art at University College London, where she made her first sculptures. She returned to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to complete her degree from 1965 to 1967. During this time, she also had her first photography exhibition and continued sculpting, though she didn’t exhibit the latter.

In 1967, Cohen attended Ox-Bow School of Art and Artists’ Residency in Saugatuck, Michigan. That same year, she began making prints using imagery from consumer catalogues. In 1968, she attended the University of Michigan, married philosopher Andrew Lugg and began teaching at Eastern Michigan University, where she earned her MFA in studio art the following year. She taught at Eastern Michigan University from 1968 to 1973.

While in school, Cohen’s primary influences included British pop artist Richard Hamilton and contemporaries such as Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Claes Oldenburg. She continued to work in printmaking, mainly in etching but also in silkscreening. She exhibited these prints in 1970 and 1971 and won several awards. At this time, she was captivated by the photography techniques that were commonly used in postcards, real estate and advertising.

Teaching Career

In 1971, Lynne Cohen got a view camera and began to turn her attention toward photography. In 1972, Cohen and her husband made Front and Back, a 16 mm film. The following year, they moved to Ottawa. In 1974, Cohen began teaching photography in the Department of Visual Arts at the University of Ottawa — a post she held until 2005.

In addition to her teaching job at the University of Ottawa, Cohen taught at Ottawa’s Algonquin College from 1973 to 1975. She also held short-term teaching positions at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1984 and 1992, as well as at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, Toronto Metropolitan University and the École des beaux-arts de Bordeaux in France. In 1975, Cohen began her association with Yajima Gallery, located in Montreal, and was awarded her first Canada Council grant.

Work Characteristics

Lynne Cohen’s formal artistic education was in sculpture and printmaking, and she began her career when minimalism and pop art were dominant trends. However, the bulk of her career (and where she found her greatest success) was in black and white photographs of interior spaces, often without any human forms. She only began exhibiting her colour photography in the late 1990s.

The spaces depicted in Cohen’s work often look like artificially constructed sets, but in truth they are all spaces that she documented as she found them. Over the course of her career, she moved toward larger and larger formats for her photography, to the point where her still-life photos of interior spaces became immersive environments, inviting the viewer to step into the photos. Her work often features neutral lighting and unexpected repetition or patterns. It occasionally showcases odd objects located in otherwise benign everyday locations (e.g., a bedroom set in the middle of a classroom or a flight simulator that looks like a coin-operated ride for a small child).

“I once wrote about my work as being loaded with storytelling. Even if you know the work, it’s still always incredibly complicated. And why does it have to make sense? The images are pieces of a narrative puzzle that could be about anything. It’s totally absurd. Absurd, but it does tell a story. So the work goes back and forth; it is narrative and it isn’t.” —Lynne Cohen

Collections

Lynne Cohen’s work can be found in public and private collections across Canada and around the world. Her work is held at the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Canadian Centre for Architecture, the National Gallery of Canada, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ), the Walter Phillips Gallery in Banff, Alberta (see Walter Phillips), the Winnipeg Art Gallery, the National Gallery of Australia,the Bibliothèque nationale de France and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

In total, her photography has been the subject of 11 books. She has had well over 100 individual shows (and many more group exhibitions) over the course of her career.

Honours and Awards

In 1967, Lynne Cohen received the Logan Award for printmaking at the 71st Annual Exhibition by Artists of Chicago and Vicinity, held at the Art Institute of Chicago. She was awarded senior arts grants from the Canada Council for the Arts in 1986, 1989, 1997 and 2002. She received senior arts grants from the Ontario Arts Council in 1985, 1993 and 2001.

In 1991, Cohen won the Canada Council’s Victor Martyn Lynch-Staunton Award. She won a Gold Award issued by the National Magazine Awards in 2001 and one of the Governor General’s Awards in Visual and Media Arts in 2005. In 2011, she was the inaugural winner of the Scotiabank Photography Award. The $50,000 prize also came with a showcased exhibition of Cohen’s work at the 2012 Scotiabank Contact Photography Festival, as well as a book deal with the publisher Steidl.

Wanting to give something back to assist other visual artists and photographers, Cohen decided to leave part of her estate to fund the Prix Lynne-Cohen. The biennial US$10,000 cash prize has been administered by MNBAQ since 2017. The first winner was Maryse Goudreau, a multidisciplinary artist and photographer originally from the Gaspé Peninsula.

More than 1,100 of Lynne Cohen’s photographs are kept in the Lynne Cohen Fonds at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives.

(See also Photography in Canada.)