Mark Cohen was born in 1943 in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. In 1969, he took part in the group show Vision and Expression curated by Nathan Lyons at the George Eastman House in Rochester. In 1971 Cohen received a Guggenheim Fellowship to continue his work in Wilkes-Barre and its surroundings. John Szarkowski devoted a solo show to him at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1973, which then toured to the Light Gallery, Castelli Graphics, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 1975, William Jenkins commissioned Cohen to produce a body of work in color. This series, True Color, was exhibited at the George Eastman House the following year. In 1975 Cohen received a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship and in 1976 his second Guggenheim Fellowship. In 1978, he took part in the exhibition Mirrors and Windows: American Photography since 1960.

Cohen has published three monographs, Grim Street (powerHouse Books, 2005), True Color (powerHouse Books, 2007), and Italian Riviera (Punctum Press, 2008). Mark Cohen lives and works in Philadelphia. He is represented by Bruce Silverstein Gallery in New York and ROSEGALLERY in Los Angeles.