Come See Uncle John’s Photos
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“When I started there was not much interest in this kind of music,” says John Cohen, an aficionado of rural American sounds. Back in the 50s, after Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music became the bible for a handful of true believers, Cohen traipsed through the south making field recordings; amid the farms and coal mines of Kentucky he discovered remarkable artists like banjoist and guitarist Roscoe Holcomb, a construction worker from Daisy, Kentucky, who mixed folk, blues, and white gospel singing. In 1958 Cohen started one of the first neo-old-time groups, the New Lost City Ramblers (immortalized in the Grateful Dead tune “Uncle John’s Band”). Three years later he helped organize the University of Chicago’s folk festival, and a year after that, he and his friend Ralph Rinzler started their own performance series in New York City under the banner “Friends of Old Time Music.” Such efforts nurtured the folk revival of the early 60s, which launched major new talents like Bob Dylan and Joan Baez.
“All these years my photographs were appreciated because they showed pictures of musicians, but they were rarely appreciated for being photographs, my visual work,” says Cohen, who lives in Putnam Valley, New York. “That’s what’s changed.” His portraits capture the musicians’ pride and a passion for sound that borders on possession. “The lens became like the balance point in an equation that had the visible world on one side and the interior world on the other,” he writes in There Is No Eye. One shot of old-time musicians Wade Ward and Charlie Higgins illustrates that extraordinary balance: one can see they’re natural musicians from the way they hold their instruments and themselves, yet their faces reveal a hint of suspicion.
