It was suppose to be an interview, but meeting the legendary Ira Cohen ended up feeling a bit like a surreal cup of tea with a friend. The “father of Mylar photography”, the poet, film maker and photographer is a charismatic man, a natural story teller who loves people. A passionate multi-talented artist at the forefront of the Trance movement that has taken pictures of the likes of Jimmy Hendrix and Angus MacLise. He’s photos have also been used as album covers for Hendrix, John Mclaughlin and Pharaoh Sanders.
Jimi Hendrix
Ira Cohen: It’s very nice to meet you, where do you want to sit?
BCR: It’s nice to meet you too.
IC: Did you have a look at the exhibition?
BCR: Yes, I really loved everything. From the black and white work around this room, my favourite has to be the Johnny Dolphin pictures.
IC: Yeah that’s three shots of him dancing, I sort of like that one a lot too.
BCR: It feels like there’s movement in it, like a little clip of someone.
IC: And he’s also a guy that you don’t see dancing, but he’s also a dancer. He’s got a lot of personality. He’s actually behind this gallery, and the whole October movement, Theatre of all Possibilities, and Eco Technique. I started to have contact with the group from the first time I meet Johnny. I used to come to his plays and was into the plays, then I’d see Johnny and we would go somewhere, then one thing led to another. And of course this show is the result of those and other meetings and I had other shows here before. You know this gallery is really quite wonderful, and it’s lovely for me that it is in London, cause as you know I’m a hot shot New Yorker so London seems very sexy to me. In this gallery I am always at home. Right now it just feels very comfortable ‘cause I don’t live in the surroundings of my photographs on the walls of my cluttered apartment.
BCR: You have travelled a lot, so you probably do feel at home in many places now.
IC: Oh yeah, I mean compared to real travellers I probably haven’t travelled at all. But I’m old enough.
BCR: What do you mean compared to real travellers? You seem to have been everywhere?
IC: I mean compared to someone that is really travelling and that is constantly going places. They can go to 10 times as many places I’ve gone in a year, compared to 10 years in which I’ve travelled. I have travelled a lot, but I am not a consistent traveller. Though over the years I’ve gone places and I lived in places for years, like Morocco and Nepal. Mostly in Morocco and Nepal A year or so at a time and I’ve went back on many occasions. I feel very much at home at those places. As wonderful as they are, it is also possible to have shows there and I have done that. But it’s not a place where I think of so much as of having a show, but to make things, and then I can do the show somewhere else.
Julian Beck
BCR: You’ve done your ‘Starstream’ series of poetry during your time with the native craftsman in the Himalayas…
IC: I did the ‘Starstream Poetry’ series and several of my own books in there, Angus MacLise was a good friend and poet who lived there and a great drummer with the Velvet Underground and by himself. He would always be playing with his own hands on a suitcase and it could be mesmerising and he was really so good. So all that time I spent in Nepal and Morocco affected me very, very strongly and entered into my work life.
BCR: So it’s all about experience and inspiration.
IC: Definitely.
BCR: You went to the largest spiritual festival in the world, the Great Kumbh Mela Festival in India…
IC: The Kumbh Mela is the male of Aquarius, so it comes in Aquarium period. So it’s like every twelve years in 4 different places, which means that it happens every year in that place. But the twelve year one is really the big one, but there’s also a six year one, a three year one. And in between there’s a regular thing that happens in those places, so some people come and attend and do their regular rituals and worships.
BCR: Do you usually get involved or do you just watch?
IC: I do get involved in some way, ‘cause I have contact with certain people. I mean I could claim ‘yes I am a Naga’. What does that mean? I think it’s a false claim. But in some other more spiritual and personal level I do feel like I am a Naga. I have real roots in their beliefs and in what they think and feel and they are from the personality point of view in my work even if I’m an artist. Though being an artist is nothing to do with being a Naga.
BCR: Why do you say that? Is being an artist so wrong from a Naga perspective?
IC: It’s not a thing for artists or writers or something like that. It’s a certain spiritual discipline and whatever else you might be doing, if you are doing that thing, that’s what you doing. And because I am a poet, a photographer, and kind of take photographs of it, I’m kind of a cross over the boundaries of what that means. A real Naga has a certain absence and commitment to that way of life. I may consider that I’m expressing that discipline some way spiritually or in mind, or when I’m thinking about what I’m trying to accomplish today I kind of cover it with some Naga-hood. But I am not doing it with all the other personal things that it involves; the disciplines and the affairs that are part of it.
BCR: So you just follow the philosophy?
IC: Yeah, very much so.
