Mark Cohen’s Dark Knees gathers photographs made over four decades in the small mining town where he grew up. Although rooted in the street-photography culture that shaped American practice in the early 1970s, Cohen’s work resists the genre’s usual descriptive clarity. His hometown appears indirectly: through nocturnal blur, abrupt encounters and isolated details rather than orderly views of streets or civic life.

Cohen often worked without looking through the viewfinder, holding the camera away from his body and responding at close range to whatever entered his path. The resulting pictures fracture ordinary experience into torsos, shoes, knees and the backs of legs. Proximity unsettles scale; flash and darkness detach bodies from their surroundings. These are not studies of anatomy so much as records of an instinctive way of seeing, in which repetition—walking the same blocks over many years—produces strangeness rather than familiarity.

Published by Le Bal and Éditions Xavier Barral, the book accompanied exhibitions at Le Bal in Paris in 2013 and the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam in 2014–15. Its 216-page sequence places Cohen’s sustained attention to one locality within an exhibition and publishing context, while an essay by photography critic Vince Aletti provides a further point of entry. The hardback bilingual edition gives substantial space to a body of work developed through long-term return rather than geographic range.

For collectors concerned with the history of street photography, Dark Knees is notable for the precision with which it complicates that category. It brings together subject, method and duration: a circumscribed town, a deliberately unstable camera technique and forty years of recurrent looking. The book’s significance lies in how those elements are organized into a concentrated account of Cohen’s practice—one that treats the familiar street not as social panorama, but as a source of cropped, physical and unexpectedly surreal incidents.