IN THE AIR: Michael Cohen, ADV 1981, dabbles in advertising, art photography and music. He also plays bass for an R&B band.
juggling act
‘Uncanny eye for seeing’
Renaissance Man. That’s how Michael Cohen, ADV 1981, titled the personal ad that snagged the attention of the woman he eventually would marry.
“That’s exactly who he is,” Cohen’s wife Jane Wallace said. “He’s well-rounded, he’s cultured, he’s an artist and a musician.”
Cohen – production manager for Harrison and Star, a New York City-based advertising agency for the health-care industry – writes songs, plays bass guitar and sings backup for Hard Bargain, a nine-piece R&B band that recently released its second album. He is also a freelance artistic photographer who won three first-place prizes at juried shows in 2004.
As a photographer, Cohen seeks to capture the overlooked subtleties of shadows and reflections, or, as he puts it, “things the light does when no one’s looking.”
“I wish I could do that kind of cool stuff with light and shade,” said Peter Fogel, Steely Dan’s official tour photographer who also books many of Hard Bargain’s New York shows. “I appreciate good photo work, because I know how hard it is to pull off.”
Cohen’s series of photos include the Henry Hudson Bridge; Venice, Italy; and a good number of street puddles. “Of course I’m biased,” Wallace said, “but he has an uncanny eye for seeing things that other people would just walk by and miss.”
New Yorkers walking by the Citibank building in Manhattan in December likely caught a glimpse of Cohen’s 21-inch-by-25-inch framed prints hanging in the windows.
Cohen received his first camera at age 12, and at 16, exhibited his work at the Sarasota Art Association. He started in music as a teenager. After picking up the bass guitar at age 14, he founded and joined bands in Gainesville, Atlanta, Stamford (Conn.), and New York, plucking the low notes of rock, jazz, jump blues and R&B.
“There’s nothing like the feeling you get when you hear your own song on the radio,” he said, grinning. College radio stations such as Orlando’s WUCF and New Jersey’s WFDU occasionally play Hard Bargain’s material, including Cohen’s “More Blues Than I Can Use.”
“When they started out five years ago, they sounded like amateurs,” Fogel said. “They just kept getting better, and now they’re a really good band that always draws a decent crowd.”
Cohen started his studies at Rollins College in Winter Park as
an art student. He transferred to UF to study under
photographer Jerry N. Uelsmann, but
he never took photography; the lure of advertising brought him to the College.
“Advertising appealed to me because it’s so multi-faceted,” he said. “It’s visual, it’s musical, there are words involved and there’s business involved.”
After tackling those challenges at Hirschhorn-Portnoy, a now-defunct three-man ad agency in New Haven, Cohen moved to Stamford in 1982 to work for Dress Barn, where he again pooled his talents as director of sales promotions. He managed retail sales, worked with photographers and used his musical expertise to produce jingles for ads.
A job offer from advertising firm Draft Co. took him to New York. He handled direct mail and print advertising for Draft clients Verizon and Compaq Computers as senior production manager until 2004. Draft lost Compaq that year when the computer maker merged with Hewlett-Packard.
Cohen freelanced as an ad producer to pharmaceutical companies for several months before landing at Harrison and Star.
“I’m sure my employers know that if I could make a good living from the other pursuits, I’d leave,” he said. “I would give up advertising if I got a huge record deal and distribution from a major label, or if I was selling hundreds of dollars worth of pictures weekly!
“But I am thankful to have a good job in the ad biz. And I do owe a lot to my UF education, as well as my ‘on-the-job’ training over the years.”
–Eimeric Reig
