Born in New York City in 1954. He lives in Berlin.
Adam Grossman Cohen is a Super-8 filmmaker and photographer working at the intersection of film, photography and poetry. The boundaries between photography and film merged, no longer separate, now; Motion/Pictures.
Here Time, captured on 8mm movie film becomes something fluid, flowing backwards and forwards, to be seen and re-seen.
And the cities in which he has lived for most of his life become places to explore themes of memory and forgetting, history and entropy.
With hours and hours of shooting in the streets of New York, Barcelona, Marseille, Naples, Havana, Krakow, Porto, Berlin, Lisbon and Odessa, his films attempt to picture the essence of places in constant change; places submerged in time.
Blind Grace (1993) is a tense, poetic essay on the marginal people and forgotten, neglected places of New York City. Fire of Time (2000) is a film made about a place both vanished and vanishing, the historic red-light district and worker’s quarter, Barcelona’s Barrio Chino. No Peace Without War, directed with Lorenzo Castore (2012) is the story of a forgotten world that takes place behind the door of a two room apartment in Krakow, where Ewa and Piotr, sister and brother, live together. Dangerously close to its subjects, this film succeeds in telling a remarkable and disturbing story about memory and loss.
Adam has had many solo printed exhibitions and screenings in galleries and art spaces around the world, and many of his films are in the collections of many prestigious international museums.