TITLE: Jimi Hendrix
YEAR: 1968
SIZE: 16” x 20”
FORMAT: cibachrome, signed and unframed

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Currently on exhibit at the Whitney Museum’s “Summer of Love” program

“Looking at these pictures is like looking through butterfly wings …” – Jimi Hendrix

“A rare portrait of Jimi Hendrix with his double, one of the last portraits taken in the Mylar Chamber and one of the most memorable.” – Ira Cohen.

IAN MACFADYEN ON IRA COHEN’S PHOTOGRAPHS

MacFadyen on Ira Cohen: ” Cohen’s colour photographs are reflections in sheets of mylar, images of reversal and transformation, the human form in fluid metamorphosis. These images split and coalesce and vibrate in phantasmagoric configurations, suggesting both the flux of psychedelic consciousness and the reconstitution of physical matter at the atomic level. Henri Michaux, in The Major Ordeals of the Mind, writes of this “disorganizing flux, the frenzied surge which overflows in every direction, which cannot be controlled, retained or contained…” Cohen’s photographs do in fact frame and fix this delirium to an extent, which Michaux saw as the function of the artist who has been there, and brought back evidence: “For someone who knows how to deal with it…there exists a possibility of transforming the scattering, dissipating, dislocating, devastating, breaking, tearing, disco-ordinating convulsiveness into an ally, into the prop, the support of a future radiance and illumination, the very springboard of transcendence…”.

Every few years we exist in a new body, down to the last molecule, and in these hallucinatory photos we see ourselves as shape-shifters, fugitive apparitions of life which dematerializes all around us, every day, in secret. We are, in Deborah Levy’s phrase, the ‘Beautiful Mutants’. It is as if Cohen, recognizing the quality of pose and arrangement in his black-and-white portraits, at some stage felt compelled to shatter the image of contained consciousness, fixed body, permanent personality. His mylar pictures reveal to us another world, an anti-world of anti-matter where sub-atomic particles spin in an orbit reverse to the world we think we know. In Cohen’s swirling, vertiginous movie The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda, the human form becomes pure image–stretched, twisted, continually in the process of appearing and disappearing. These mutations and metamorphoses of body and consciousness resemble psychic ‘spirit photography’ of the 1920s, La photographie Transcendantale. Significantly, Cohen refers to these mylar images as astral projections and clearly they have emerged from the outer regions of photography itself – etheric spectres of the Image, psychic apparitions and alien visitations. This is the photography of the séance, and the quantum photography of other worlds.”

MORE ABOUT IRA COHEN – www.iracohen.org