• born in 1936 in Montréal, Québec
• father from Poland, mother from White Russia
• B.F.A. (1974) and M.F.A. (1979), Concordia University, Montréal, Québec

click on thumbnails at left to view larger images

Photographer Sorel Cohen has focussed her attention on portraiture, particularly self-portraiture, examining her roles as both artist and model, reinterpreting the act of gazing upon woman in art. She uses the repetition of images to introduce an element of time, to emphasize herself as performer in a frame-to-frame situation where she both performs in front of the camera, inviting the gaze, and performs behind the camera as the photographer. As Cohen expressed in a 1980 interview with Diana Nemiroff, "ambiguity is a result of the mechanics of the camera. I exploit that to find new meanings in the images." Her photographs become more than portraiture as they address the history of the woman in art and more recent feminist art history, which questions the traditional role of the woman as model, as object presented solely for the male gaze. Claudia Beck (1984) has noted that when Cohen began graduate school it was as a painting student, so that when she chose instead to pursue photography her work became the site for an intertwining of these two types of imagery. An example of this concern for the image of woman in art is her 1983 series, An Extended and Continuous Metaphor. As Robert Graham described: "Cohen has re-employed herself as model and actor in performing tableaux. Using double and triple exposures, she plays the several parts of portraitist, sitter and observer in wry sketches on the theme of artistic production" (1983). In 1980 Cohen expanded this exploration of artistic production to include a series of photographs of the male nude, in Bacon/Muybridge. She strove not only to recover and reintroduce images from the past, but also to appropriate the male nude as a subject for the female artist, to present a view of homoeroticism from a female perspective. In 1992 Cohen produced a photographic image of a train, etched on glass, called Hauptbahnhof, the train being a reminder of the trains used to transport Jews during World War II. Later, in the 1996 series, The Wounds of Experience, the figure disappeared completely and was replaced by rooms of furniture, exploring the relationship between patient and psychoanalyst. The usual couch and chair was arranged to imply the absent human relationships, creating ghostly and secretive atmospheres that echo the secret-telling of patients in session. Although her work does not generally refer directly to her Polish heritage, she created one piece, called Todesfuge (1996, later called Made Ash), honouring her father’s female relatives who had been lost in the Holocaust. In a series of photographs she superimposed their faces upon her face, in this case weighted with the effect of overlapping faces of the dead with the face of the living. Cohen has explained how the work in a sense expressed about this loss what her father refused to express: "My father lost most of his family in the Holocast. He rarely spoke of his fate or the circumstances under which they died. I was prompted to express this loss by the poem of Paul Celan’s entitled Todesfuge. I made a series of photographs whereby I overlayed my face with those of my father’s murdered female relatives--mothers, sisters, aunts, all copied from a small black, white snapshot. I also included a silk and lace handkerchief with the hateful ghetto badge embroidered on it as part of the installation" (1998).

Services culturelles du Québec, Paris, France

Galerie Optica, Montréal, Québec

S.L. Simpson Gallery, Toronto, Ontario

Mercer Union, Toronto, Ontario

a little object
Centre for Freudian Analysis and Research, London, England

Virtue and Vice: Derivations of Allegory in Contemporary Photography
International Photography Research, Amsterdam, The Netherlands;  Site Gallery, Sheffield, England (travelling)

Contemporary Canadian Works
The Art Gallery of North York, Toronto, Ontario

Empowering the Word
Carleton Univeristy Art Gallery, Ottawa, Ontario

Practicing Beauty
The Art Gallery of Hamilton, Hamilton, Ontario

The Photographic Image: Photo-Based Works
49th Parallel, New York, New York

Incorporation
Galerie d'art Lavalin, Montréal, Québec

Montréal '89
CREDAC, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

50 Years of Modern Colour Photography, 1936-1986
Photokina, Cologne, Germany

Doppleganger/Cover
Aorta Gallery, Amsterdam, Holland

Edge and Image
Concordia University Art Gallery, Montréal, Québec

Production and Axis of Sexuality
Walter Phillips Gallery, Banff, Alberta

Reflections
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Ontario

Photographie actuelle au Québec
Galerie d'art centre Saidye Bronfman/Gallery of the Saidye Bronfman Centre for the Arts, Montréal, Québec

Québec Photography Invitational. Montréal, Québec: Centre Saidye Bronfman, 1983.

Scott, Kitty. "Focus: Sorel Cohen." Canadian Art (Summer 1989): 85.

Simon, Cheryl, ed. The Zone of Conventional Practice and Other Real Stories. Montréal, Québec: Optica, 1989.

Sourkes, Cheryl. "Found missing: Archival photographs and the new historicity." Mix Magazine (Winter 1995-96): 32.

St-Gelais, Thérèse. "Sorel Cohen." Parachute, no. 45 (Winter 1986-87): 28-29.

Tuer, Dot. "Sorel Cohen at Wynick/Tuck." Canadian Art (Winter 1994): n.p.

Wilkie, Bob. "Telling pictures, revealing histories." Afterimage 17, no. 9 (April 1990): n.p.

Zelevansky, Lynn. "Sorel Cohen at the 49th Parallel." Flash Art no. 104 (October/November 1981): 55.