Fine art photographer Jim Cohoe is serious about his art, and he wants his audience to get serious about it, too. As serious at the Christie’s vice president specializing in photography who in 2013 selected one of his works for a show in Soho.
“I’m driven by what I see with my photography. It’s very important to me. I’m passionate about it,” he says.
Today, Cohoe is showing his work at the Main Street Vero Beach Gallery in downtown Vero.
Cohoe digitally photographs ordinary objects close up to record the unique variations in their surface textures and color. After a bit of fine tuning in Photoshop, the images that he presents to the world are ethereal abstractions that have little to do with their unremarkable subjects. Cohoe’s stock in trade is the timeworn, cratered, peeling, scarred, splintered and rust-accreted exteriors of junked autos, boats and other neglected structures; from time to time he also takes an interest in the seashells and drift seeds that commonly pop up on the beach.
A striking composition of jagged shards of color began as a weathered prow silently rotting away in a Fort Pierce boatyard; what looks like a flaming fireworks display is a detail of rusty cracks on a car hood; an apparent view of Mars, its surface scored with canals and veined with ivory mountain ranges, started out as a sea coconut, its husk webbed with barnacles.
“I’m trying to stop people in their tracks and make them look and think,” Cohoe explains. “I’m taking pictures of things that are not warm and fuzzy. Warm and fuzzy you forget in a second.”
Cohoe likes to work in series. In photography, the practice of using many pictures to describe a single entity goes back to photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who insisted that a series of his photos of his wife, the painter Georgia O’Keeffe, be viewed as a composite portrait. Stieglitz used the same technique when he attempted to photograph the essence of “cloud” in his “Equivalents” series.
The humble sea coconut is a far cry from Stieglitz’s lofty subject matter. The golf ball-sized brown orb comes from trees that line the Amazon; walking on Vero’s beach you will occasionally find one washed in on the tide. Cohoe used several of the nuts in various states – laced with barnacles, cracked and withered – as the subject of a self-published picture book he titled “The Great Balls of Indian River County,” or “Balls” for short.
In the book’s preface Cohoe ponders the case of a friend who had found so many of the nuts on the beach that he dismissed them as “not so great.”
Cohoe, however, thought them compelling enough to bring some home, where he photographed them in the natural light of late afternoon.
Set on a black piece of cloth, the balls were individually scrutinized by Cohoe’s lens to reveal each one’s minutest surface detail. By scattering a few grains of sand on the backdrop, the artist transformed a ball into a planet in a galaxy of stars. Photographed as a group, the balls became moons in flight; placed on a crinkled piece of aluminum foil, they were space travelers from an alien world.
“I don’t know why, but I always go back and go back and go back to the same subject” Cohoe says.
It’s the same story with the scrapyard cars Cohoe photographed every summer near his home in Saginaw, Michigan. An old boatyard in Fort Pierce is another of Cohoe’s favored photographic hunting grounds; its owners allow him the run of the place.
“I try to exhaust my subject so I don’t miss anything at all. I’ll go back and shoot the same boat dozens and dozens of times, under different light conditions.”
Even the brushed steel doors of an electric service box (a bunker-like protuberance in Riverside Park) became the starting point of Cohoe’s series of storm-tossed seascapes, photographic images that are no less romantically poetic than J.M.W. Turner’s painted tempests.
Cohoe paired the photos with brief accounts of historic gales in his book, “Great Storms of the Great Lakes.”
“I lived on the Great Lakes for many years, so the storms were an important part of our lives,” he says.
Born in Detroit, young Cohoe used to visit the Detroit Institute of Art, where his aunt was a docent. Back then he was awestruck by the Institute’s enormous fresco cycle by Mexican master Diego Rivera. The mural depicts the automotive industry at its prime with a particular emphasis on the workers that toil in the steely entrails of the Ford Motor Company.
“It’s as much a stunner as Picasso’s “Guernica” was to me when I saw it in Spain,” he says. “Just knocks your socks off.”
After studying marketing and business at several small colleges in Michigan (he never got the degree), Cohoe went to work for himself as the owner of a gift shop and custom framing store. Having started taking pictures as a hobby in his 20s, his shop was the first place he exhibited his prints. That was back in the gelatin silver days.
Later on he was the editor of his own small-town daily, The Cheboygan News. He was not only an editor but the main columnist, the photographer, and the person that takes the paper off the press. He didn’t have to develop and print his film, however; he contracted that out.
Cohoe began to develop his photo-documentary skills into a fine art form after he and his wife Jeannine – who goes by Jeany – began spending winters in Vero. They became full-time residents a little over a year ago.
Cohoe credits two local photographers with helping him develop an artist’s eye.
One of them, Louis J. Ciszek, is a successful wedding and portrait photographer. Cohoe took photo classes from him early on at the Vero Beach Museum of Art.
“Louie’s two things were ‘Look for the light’ and ‘Think outside the box.’ He kept pushing the latter.”
Cohoe studied privately with commercial and fine art photographer Aric Attas for about eight years. He later took Attas’ Photoshop classes at the museum.
“Aric would see things in my work that I never saw or understood,” Cohoe says. In critiquing his work, Attas “told me who I was. I was just astounded because he was right.”
Cohoe also studied on his own, perusing books about painting and drawing as well as photography, to learn how the masters composed pictures and used color.
Those years of study paid off. Since 2006 Cohoe has enjoyed exhibiting locally in both solo and group shows. His work has also been included in 30 regional and national photo competitions; he has won 18 awards for his work.
Cohoe is particularly proud of his 2013 inclusion in the 18th National Photo Competition at Soho Photo Gallery in New York City. He was represented by his print of a sea-sculpted conch shell.
The juror, Laura Paterson, is a vice president and specialist in the photography department at Christie’s, New York. She selected 40 images for the show from a field of over 1,000 entries from photographers in 35 states, including Alaska and Hawaii.
It’s a big deal, Cohoe says.
A selection of Cohoe’s photographs as well as his work in pottery can be seen through this month at the Main Street Vero Beach Gallery at 2036 14th Ave., Suite 103.
