Occupied Territory by Lynne Cohen, made during the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and Canada, examines unoccupied domestic, commercial, recreational, educational, and institutional interiors.
The project brings together photographs from the early decades of Cohen’s sustained exploration of found interiors. Its subjects shift from living rooms, banquet halls, clubs, and lobbies toward classrooms, laboratories, police schools, simulators, and military facilities. Through spaces shaped by postwar commercial decor and technical systems, Cohen examines how people organize environments and how those environments condition behavior. Empty chairs, worn switches, erased boards, dummies, and mannequins register bodily absence, while surveillance, instruction, authority, simulation, and the uncertain boundary between nature and culture recur across the work.
The photographs are black and white, with simple, controlled framing and flat lighting that give walls, corners, partitions, carpets, and curtains a boxed, stage-like presence. Formica, linoleum, veneer, tile, nylon, faux marble, and Naugahyde emphasize manufactured surfaces. Artificial clouds, camouflage, plants, animal pelts, and taxidermy bring displaced versions of nature indoors. The restrained viewpoint lets improbable arrangements produce a mood that moves between administrative calm, unease, and dry humor.
Cohen used a large-format view camera and made early contact prints from 5 x 7-inch and 8 x 10-inch negatives, followed by larger gelatin-silver prints. Working with a moderately wide-angle lens, she valued precise surface detail and an apparently neutral rendering. Access depended on permission from functioning institutions. Once inside, she worked with little intervention, occasionally simplifying a scene but bringing no props and photographing rooms largely as found.
Aperture published Occupied Territory in 1987 as Cohen's first monograph. The work had its New York debut at P·P·O·W in 1988 and was later presented at Galería Fúcares in Madrid in 2001 and Stephen Daiter Gallery in Chicago in 2011. Aperture's expanded 2012 edition added previously unpublished photographs, accompanied by a Higher Pictures exhibition that presented vintage contact prints alongside early enlargements.
