Lynne Cohen: Model Dining Room, from the series Occupied Territory

This image is part of Lynn Cohen’s Occupied Territory series, also published as Cohen’s first monograph by Aperture in 1987. The book is Cohen’s visual exploration of the world’s readymade sculptures that exist in common places like classrooms, offices, and waiting rooms. She amplifies the awkwardness that occurs when the inhabitants attempt to create a feeling of warmth and individualism in otherwise sterile environments.

Surveying the surface of this particular space, Cohen allows her camera to describe an innate contradiction of order and incongruity. Due to the geometric organization within the room, the sculptural figure of the female form becomes arbitrary. The archetypal form that is being shown is meant to invoke feelings of hominess. However, her transparency and gesture negate her purpose as she presents dinner to an empty room.

This limited-edition photograph was released on the occasion of an expanded and updated reissue of Occupied Territory (Aperture, 2012), making Cohen’s pioneering work available to a contemporary audience and situating her appropriately within the lineage of Lewis Baltz, Stephen Shore, and other widely celebrated Topographic photographers.

Each limited-edition print is hand-packed with great care and ships from New York within 3–5 days.