"One early idea I had was to be a painter, but that was overtaken by photography. Photography won out between the prospect of a life in front of an easel or photographing out in the world. It could be personal, subjective and documentary. The lens became like the balance point of an equation, with the visible world on one side and the interior world on the other."

	John Cohen and Deborah Bell photos Photographer John Cohen captured Beat artist Jack Kerouac listening to himself on the radio in 1959. Click photo for larger image.

That statement by musician, photographer and filmmaker John Cohen is as succinct and insightful a self-examination by an artist as I've heard, and it affords a way to think about his diverse life work that pulls it all together.

Cohen's astute commentary accompanies 100 of his fascinating documentary-style black-and-white photographs in the handsomely displayed exhibition "there is no eye: Photographs by John Cohen," at Silver Eye Center for Photography through Saturday.

The traveling exhibition originated at the Photographic Resource Center at Boston University. It was organized by independent curator John P. Jacob, who interviewed Cohen and also picked through thousands of images to select those exhibited, most of them from the 1950s and 1960s.

Taken in locations as seemingly disparate as the American South, lower Manhattan and Peru, and including artists and musicians, cityscapes and rural communities, what unifies them is the artist's vision.

Cohen talks about visiting these and other locales, and concludes, "I met Roscoe Holcomb in Kentucky, and his singing cut into me. Around the same time I was hanging out with Beat poets and Abstract Expressionist painters in New York. They and Roscoe had the same effect on me. They didn't seem so different from each other, out there wailing and putting their worlds together in unexpected ways."

As Silver Eye executive director Linda Benedict-Jones puts it, "The glue is John Cohen himself."

Cohen's "Tenth Street, New York City," 1959, is among his works on display at Silver Eye Center for Photography. Click photo for larger image.

Cohen is probably best known as co-founder, in 1958, of the string band the New Lost City Ramblers, which was influenced by 1920s and '30s Appalachian music and, in turn, influenced young artists who would themselves become music legends, like Bob Dylan and Jerry Garcia.

He's said to have been the inspiration for the Grateful Dead song "Uncle John's Band." The exhibition title was taken from liner notes for Dylan's 1965 "Highway 61 Revisited" album.

But his larger contribution is more sweeping.

While his photographs are in such collections as those of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. -- markers of success for any artist -- it is telling that they also were the inspiration for a Smithsonian Folkways CD drawn from the institution's prestigious collection of American traditional music.

The latter, "there is no eye: Music for Photographs," plays in the gallery, setting mood and expanding the richness of the experience of the pictures.

Cohen had an ear -- and a heart -- for music that he felt was endangered.

He, Ralph Rinzler and Israel Young founded the Friends of Old Time Music and brought many of the musicians to play in New York -- and then the Newport and Smithsonian folk festivals -- introducing them to a broader audience and helping to establish their reputations.

"We were engaged in a struggle for the image of American music," he says.

The camera was a medium, but even more so than with many photographers, it was a tool that helped Cohen achieve goals that he defined through the process of working. Sound was a passion, but Cohen knew that it didn't exist in a vacuum, that it became more when it rose off the porches, church pews and byways that it had gestated in than when it made a fresh-scrubbed appearance on an elevated generic stage.

So the sounds he recorded to share and to preserve were embellished by pictures not only of their creators but of their larger cultural landscapes. And when he realized that single images weren't sufficient to do his subjects justice, he turned to film, including the seminal "high lonesome sound," the title taken from the phrase he'd coined to describe the mountain music he'd learned to love.

Looking at the body of photographs, Benedict-Jones says, "Underneath it all I feel a bedrock of respect for these people. An enormous respect for a certain kind of primal energy that was there and that was severely endangered."

Cohen, she says, appreciated "a song from the heart -- a cry from the heart," whether it came from a gospel singer in Harlem, a banjo picker in Kentucky or flute players in the Andes in Peru.

"He wanted to share it with a larger audience, which he managed to do with a lot of hard and unglamorous work that truly went into his decades-long endeavor."

Without that we'd have neither visual nor aural knowledge of many of these people. "He deserves an enormous amount of credit," Benedict-Jones says.

"Cohen" continues through Saturday at 1015 E. Carson St., South Side. Admission is free. Hours are noon to 5 p.m. today through Saturday; until 9 p.m. tomorrow. On Saturday, there will be a screening of Martin Scorsese's two-part PBS documentary "Bob Dylan: No Direction Home." Call 412-431-1810 or visit www.silvereye.org.