Mick Hartley

Corporate or institutional interiors captured by American-Canadian photographer Lynne Cohen. Not a person in sight, nor indeed much of a clue about what these places are. Hotel lobbies? Psychiatric wards? Health spas? It barely matters.

Refreshingly she offers none of the kind of commentary you might expect: condemning our soulless antiseptic modern world, for instance, or bemoaning the horrors of bland tasteless corporatism. Not a mention of alienation. Instead we have these enigmatic and beautifully composed photographs of…interior space. 

Here's a remembrance of her - she died almost three years ago – with some nice quotes:

I prefer to allude to things and leave it to the viewer to fill in the details. Like Brecht and Godard, I want the audience to do some work.

All too often, the world seems to me to have been fabricated by an architect out of foam-core. The scale of things is nearly always off, and incidental things look monumental.

I have never been indifferent to the subjects I photograph, only ambivalent.

I take my work to be social and political but there is no concrete message. Perhaps that is why I feel much closer in spirit to Jacques Tati than to Michel Foucault.

Plenty of books, too.