Look closely at this book, as you would at one of those "name ten things that are wrong with this picture" illustrations in a kid's activity book (or the recent Photoshopped image pairs LIFE publishes as "picture puzzles"). There are a number of things "wrong" with it. The front cover, an image of submarine silhouettes on a sunflower yellow wall the tone of the book's boards, carries the number '111'; this is where the photograph appears in the book, at the very end of the plate section, from which it seems to have floated. The book's title and Cohen's name appear on what normally functions as the back cover. The title page-usually one of the first things you encounter, leafing through-appears twice, after the French and English copyright/credit/acknowledgment pages, amidst the book's back matter just before the rear flyleaf, almost as though this were a Japanese publication, meant to be read right to left (or back to front, with my Western bias).




All of this reinforces Cohen's ongoing program of destabilization and tweaking of norms and conventions of visual experience. Since the early 1970s she has been recording views of simulated realities, of truth masquerading as fiction camouflaged as truth. Cover, published last summer in conjunction with an eponymous exhibition in Cherbourg-Octeville, France, is the first in-depth consideration of Lynne Cohen's work in color. But it is incorrect to say this is the first time color has entered her work. Her recognizable black-and-white images, reproduced first in the 1987 Aperture monograph Occupied Territory, were typically framed in colored Linoleum, chosen to emphasize what Cohen remembered of a scene's dominant hue (sometimes optical, sometimes perceptual/emotional).




Since 2000 color has wound its way into the images themselves. But instead of becoming more comprehensible with the arrival of this additional information, her scenes move further toward the surreal, toward what Germans describe as "komisch," more funny-strange than funny-haha. (Humor, in many forms, is a critical and underappreciated part of Cohen's enterprise.) Even though there is direct sunlight entering and windows offering clear views out of what in Cohen's reckonings were always hermetically sealed spaces (pp. 22, 86, 92), such rational clues shed their moorings and the images embark on the uncanny seas. As one stares into these eerily calm environs ("It's quiet, Sheriff." "Yeah, too quiet."), the color works its subtle manipulations, expanding the boundary between what we see and what we think we understand. The large reproductions, barely contained on 9.5 by 12 inch sheets, allow an extra frisson of access; I found myself drawn into trances by these images, though it seemed the more I looked, the less I knew. —George Slade