Lois Cohen’s Love for the Fantastical and the Outrageous

Lois Cohen, the new shining photography star at Halal, believes that creativity “came very naturally” to her. Growing up in a creative household and living with her family in an artist studio in an old school building with “extremely high ceilings,” which they shared with a community of artists, had an enormous impact on her creative journey, as one would imagine. “We had a huge unkempt courtyard garden with big overgrown trees that made the whole place isolate itself from the rest of the city in the most pleasant way.” During her time in the studio, she watched her parents constantly create. Lois’ father was a conceptual artist turned creative director, so she “got the conceptual side from him,” while she got the hyper-visual side from her mother, an illustrator turned dollmaker. Growing up in this environment, Lois met a lot of interesting people that she would later acquaint herself with for her projects. This also helped her to later establish the very crucial connections that would pave her artistic way to some of the most prominent subjects in her photography, finding them in different contexts, like scenes of the nightlife of the city, or far out of it.

Something peculiar that Lois remembers from her childhood, that might have been sort of an inkling for what she would go on to do later was playing with dolls until she was about thirteen years old. “This apparently was very unusual for that age, I even remember getting bullied for it. But I interacted more with dolls than with kids my age, because I got bullied in the first place.” This quickly changed when Lois found her crowd at IVKO, a small creative high school in Amsterdam. 

“It was unlike any other school. Everyone was cool with each other, there was no social hierarchy. Being a weirdo was kind of the norm. It was also a complete mess. You could skip school on a regular basis without getting in trouble. I remember in some classes, it was allowed to smoke cigarettes. And kids would smoke weed with teachers during breaks. The place was run by old hippies.” In the true spirit of creativity, Lois found her little nook in the bubble of IVKO and finally felt accepted for who she was and who she became. This is where she would find her first steps on the way to her current job.

“At IVKO I made a bunch of friends, whom I ultimately didn’t treat much differently than my dolls, as I would dress them up and stage scenarios for them. This, and through self-portraiture is how I actually got into photography.” Since she grew up during the early stages of social media, when the MySpace era was in full swing, Lois would quite literally upload everything she made on the internet - that’s how she managed to make somewhat of a name for herself at a relatively young age.

This process was probably the most fun part of Lois entering the creative spheres - although there weren’t any connections, crazy networking, or apprenticeships, she was lucky and hard-working enough to get recognised by just having a blast on the internet with her work. “Slowly some individuals, companies and magazines wanted to have something to do with my work, and it became my job. Isn’t that great?” Great indeed. 

Starting off as a very free-spirited young kid, and moving through her first experiences with photography with the same unhindered, almost child-like naivety of just wanting to see her daydreams come to life, Lois noticed that with the arrival of commissioned work, she had become more self-conscious. Although providing a lot of lessons, the profession also took away the intuition she had when she was younger. “I used to have a more instinctive approach to photography. Lately, I’ve been working on getting it back,” she says.

“When we grow older that self-consciousness creeps in unconsciously. We need to become conscious of it, to get rid of some of it. Being an adult is pretty pathetic,” says Lois. How she does this is by going back to her roots - allowing herself to mess around, let go of the pressure that the image has to be good or published somewhere, and just doing what she is best at, which is pure creativity. She mentions a personal project from the night before our interview, where she got a burst of creativity at 3:00 AM and decided to turn herself into a character she had been imagining. “It was a very 15-year-old-me style project. Sloppy make-up, a desk lamp as a light source and editing in the most basic way.”

So where does the inspiration for all of this originate from? Lois puts it quite frankly: “Human beings, city life, the suburbs, family life, the internet, the fantastical, the outrageous, the boring, cultural Identity, underdogs, freaks, eccentrics, normals, conservatives.” Basically, everything human that can be observed and dressed up, or stripped down to what it really is at its core. “The contradictions that can be found in all of the above and life itself leads me to the core concepts of my photography.” That, by the way, according to the photographer, also includes UFOs, conspiracy theories and lowbrow culture. 

Here’s some more, of Lois’ inspirations in her own words: “Sesame Street, ‘90s anime, Cartoon Network, Adult Swim, Mike Kelley, Robert Crumb, The Eric Andre show, Matthew Barney, Diane Arbus, Maurizio Cattelan, warrior women, the list goes on. And movies, lots of movies.” 

This interesting mix of sources and aesthetics that has affected her work led her to her most pivotal project taking shape - ‘Metamorphosis’. This is a project in which Indiana Roma Voss and Lois “redefine female icons and figures throughout history that has shaped today’s image culture - from religion, to pop culture, from art history, to cartoons.” By recasting the women embodying these historical and cultural role models and reconstructing certain elements within the classic imagery, the meaning of the image itself changes entirely. “Breaking free from stereotypical and one-dimensional portrayals, the series seeks to create new archetypes of heroines of all types of girls and women to relate to and feel empowered by.” Blowing up both online and in real life, being exhibited in multiple galleries and museums, Metamorphosis definitely set the tone for Lois’ career from then on. “Since then my work has been really women-based and it led me to more commissioned work related to the strength of women and female empowerment.”