The American South, 1957-1962 (For communities photographed by John Cohen please click here)

In tandem with the travel done for his research on old time American folk music, Cohen photographed the daily lives of the people he met at home, around the coalmines, in the dry fields and at religious gatherings. His work encompasses many disciplines – ethno-musicology, visual anthropology, Appalachian studies, and the politics of poverty. To help set the scene, Cohen’s monograph The High & Lonesome Sound (Steidl, 2012) includes two thirty-minute films and thirteen audio recordings he made of Roscoe Holcomb in the form of a DVD and CD. A later book, Speed Bumps on a Dirt Road: When Old Time Music Met Bluegrass coincided with Ken Burns’ 8 part documentary Country, for which he drew heavily on Cohen’s photographs and films.