“The thing I walked away with from this project is that people are people are people,” Stewart Cohen told me today of his “Identity” project. An excellent and accomplished commercial photographer, Cohen has been working on this personal project for ten years, recently reaching a major milestone by publishing “Identity: A Photographic Meditation from the Inside Out” — an elegant, labor-of-love book that includes 50 portraits of famous people who caught Cohen’s interest. Next to each full-frame portrait are words by each subject, in their own handwriting, commenting on their identity.
For “Identity” Cohen made 130 portraits, editing them tightly for the book. Although all his subjects can be labeled “famous,” they do fall into the any one, easily definable category, such as “musicians,” “scientists,” “Nobel Prize winners,” “activists” or “politicians.” Six of Cohen’s subjects point to the breath of his coverage: Bobby McFerrin, Erin Brockovich, Oscar Niemeyer, Jane Goodall, Stephen Hawking and Jack Kilby. (Jack who? He’s the Nobel prize winner.)
“Whether your a drifter or bad-ass scientist, the human experience is the human experience,” Cohen told me. “There’s no magic. People become what they want to become.”