Paul Cohen’s *Things Aren’t Always as Mother Reports* takes its title from a line that could belong to a family anecdote, and the book itself works in that register—close, unresolved, and dependent on what is left unsaid. Published by Dewi Lewis in 2021, it gathers 52 colour plates across 104 pages of portraits and landscapes made in a documentary mode. The subjects are Cohen’s sons. He photographed them not to illustrate a thesis about childhood but to see whether the camera might disclose something that ordinary familiarity obscures.
The photographs are not candid snapshots. Cohen’s sons participate in a repeated ritual with their father, and in doing so they become performers of boyhood—aware, perhaps, of the roles available to them. The book watches them navigate their surroundings and asks what they are thinking, what they are feeling, and why. Nothing is explained outright. The tension lies in that restraint. Happiness registers as precarious, always close to being lost, and the pictures avoid the consolation of a resolved narrative.
An essay by Val Williams accompanies the plates. Williams has curated for the Barbican Art Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum, the National Media Museum, Tate Britain, and the British Council, and holds a chair in the history and culture of photography at the London College of Communication. Her contribution situates Cohen’s project within a wider conversation about British photography, while the sequence itself moves from a father’s particular experience toward something less private: the conditions under which boys grow up in the UK now.
For collectors, the book’s value lies in its method rather than any claim to rarity. Cohen, a London-based photographer with an MFA from Hartford University, builds a cumulative portrait through repetition and attention to place. The hardback, with jacket, is a considered object: 25 by 20.2 centimetres, compact enough for the intimacy of the subject, substantial enough for the landscapes and portraits to hold the page. It is a book to live with and revisit, not to consume once.
