A Canadian photographer born in Racine, Wisconsin, in 1944 and who died in Montreal in 2014, Lynne Cohen began her career as a sculptor and printmaker before turning to photography in the early 1970s. Her favorite subjects were enclosed spaces, devoid of human presence, which both frightened and fascinated her. The photographer plays on the ambiguity between found and arranged places, between ready-made and installation. Her training as a sculptor can be seen in her ultra-precise and monumental perception of objects, which makes them unusual and veils them in a certain strangeness. 

Her work has been the subject of more than 200 exhibitions around the world, notably in France, since the 1990s, at the FRAC Limousin (1992) and more recently at the Pavillon populaire in Montpellier (2019). A first retrospective of her work was presented at the National Gallery of Canada in 2002, then at the Musée de l’Élysée in Lausanne the following year, and at the Mapfre Foundation in Madrid in 2014. Lynne Cohen’s photographs can be found in numerous collections in France and abroad (FOMU, Antwerp; Mapfre Foundation, Madrid; National Gallery of Canada, Toronto, etc.).