For over thirty five years Lynne Cohen has focused on unpeopled interiors. Observed, found scenes, they nevertheless appear highly constructed or artificial. Cohen has explained that
photographs from the beginning have been about various sorts of artifice and deception. I started out probing the boundaries between the found and the constructed, the absurd and the deadly serious, the animate and the inert, and I've been probing them ever since.
Cohen's celebrated vintage black and white photographs have given way to larger-scale colour images and a shift to different types of found spaces:
The mens clubs, halls, beauty salons, living rooms and lobbies I photographed early on are much more commonplace and accessible than the target ranges, classrooms, spas, military installations and training environments I now photograph. In the new pictures, there is a more critical edge because I have become more concerned with manipulation and control.