ART : No Snap Decisions : It wasn’t that long ago that Stephen Cohen was organizing photography fairs in his living room. Now, his hard work has paid off with a new 3,000-square-foot glass-front gallery to showcase photographers.

‘Welcome to my new space,” says photography dealer Stephen Cohen as a middle-aged man steps into a sparkling clean, light-filled gallery on Beverly Boulevard.

“You’ve grown,” the visitor says. Cohen hands him the list of works in the inaugural show: Depression-era images by the late Arthur Rothstein.

The scene here has calmed since an opening reception on April 21 packed in several hundred people. But Cohen is looking a bit dazed as he and his staff settle into their new home and deal with a steady stream of inquiries.

Veteran photographer Horace Bristol, who lives in Ojai, drops by to pay his respects. Rothstein’s work was a good choice for the gallery’s debut because it sets a dignified tone, Bristol tells Cohen approvingly.

A relative of Rothstein who just heard about the exhibition calls Cohen and promises to visit. And now someone else is on the line, asking for directions to the gallery.

“I hope people like the space,” Cohen says. “And I hope they find it comfortable. We’ve put chairs in the front, near the bookshelves and fireplace, so that people can sit and look at the books and have a cup of coffee.”

Located at 7358 Beverly Blvd.--in the same block as Muse restaurant, Richard Telles Fine Arts, a couple of trendy clothing shops and two adventurous furniture stores, Modernica and In House Interiors--the gallery is only two blocks east of the space it occupied for the past three years. But the new 3,000-square-foot, glass-front showcase seems a long way from the gallery’s former 750-square-foot hideaway, on the second floor of a courtyard complex. And it is light years away from the days when Cohen was organizing photography fairs in his living room or spending months on the road in search of clients.

Contrary to appearances, Cohen hasn’t struck it rich. Like most of his peers, he still works hard to make sales in a difficult market. As for Photo L.A. and Photo Santa Fe, the annual photography fairs he still organizes, he says that labor eats up most of the profit.

But, at 47, Cohen appears to be reaping the harvest of two decades of work in the field. At the very least, the new gallery gives him a more substantial presence, along with offices for the fairs. With gallery director Chloe Ziegler, he plans to present exhibitions year round. Among other events, he’s looking forward to mounting a show of Floris Neususs’ work for the Los Angeles International Biennial Invitational, a collaborative venture that is expected to bring exhibitions from foreign countries to about 50 local galleries July 12-Aug. 20.

Cohen, a native of Brooklyn, says he got hooked on photography in his college days while taking his own pictures. “I guess you could call them humanist images,” he says. “Pictures of people were what interested me.”

After completing undergraduate work at Brooklyn College, where he majored in art and photography and minored in theater and television, he moved to Los Angeles to study at USC’s film school. He was granted a master of fine arts degree in 1972 and still aspires to scriptwriting, but photography consumes the visible part of his professional life.

Cohen’s entrepreneurial enterprises began with buying photography books. “That’s all I could afford,” he says of the period when he was trying to establish himself as a photographer. As the books piled up, he began to sell duplicates to photography dealers. “But books are heavy and they take up a lot of space,” he says. “And the markup isn’t that much unless you find something really special.”

Before long, he found it more profitable to ferret out photographs to sell. The money still wasn’t great, but he learned a lot and got his kicks by discovering the work of unknown or forgotten artists.

Cohen emerged on Los Angeles’ gallery scene in 1979, as executive director of Cameravision, an artists’ cooperative that presented photography exhibitions in the historic Los Altos building on Wilshire Boulevard. But he effectively disappeared in 1981, when he returned to private dealing and took his business on the road.

“In 1985, I took my first trip across the country to contact museums and collectors,” he says. “Until the fall of 1991, when I organized the first Photo L.A., I took two trips a year and spent a total of six or seven months a year out of Los Angeles.” He drummed up business in Kansas City, St. Louis, Atlanta, Chicago and Minneapolis, among other cities. He also spent a lot of time in New York, where he discovered that “there’s money to be made finding things at downtown galleries and selling them to uptown dealers.”

His modest success came from hard work and doing what others didn’t have the time or inclination to do, Cohen says. “I worked as a middleman and got a reputation for being able to sell almost anything.”

The travel was exhilarating and liberating. “It gives you a whole different perspective,” he says. “You find out that there’s a whole country out there. I had more clients in Kansas City than in Los Angeles.”

But being away from home for long spells is also exhausting. Weary of the grind and looking for an easier way to find new clients, he holed up in his living room and organized the first Photo L.A. Some dealers were wary of the idea, but he signed up 25 vendors for the inaugural event at Butterfield & Butterfield’s galleries in January, 1992. This year’s fair, held in January, included 35 dealers who reported doing about $500,000 worth of business. Cohen says he has a waiting list of colleagues who want to join the fair, which he plans to move next year from Hollywood to an undisclosed location in Beverly Hills.

On March 1, 1992, on the heels of the first fair, he opened his courtyard gallery. “The only reason I could do Photo L.A. was because I didn’t have a gallery,” he says. Still, he wanted a permanent place to stage exhibitions, so he and Ziegler have been doing what he calls “a juggling act” ever since.

The act got more complicated in the summer of 1993, when Cohen presented his first Photo Santa Fe. Now, with the new gallery up and running, he’s preparing for this year’s Photo Santa Fe at the Sweeney Convention Center July 20-23. He’s also planning another cross-country business trip. But for the moment, he is enjoying the new space on Beverly.

Offering photographs priced from $350 to more than $10,000, with “a good range of work from $500 to $1,000,” Cohen claims that photography is a bargain.

“I hope people will buy Christmas gifts here,” he says. “If you are going to spend $3,000 on a jacket, why not a photograph?”

* “Arthur Rothstein,” photographs, Stephen Cohen Gallery, 7358 Beverly Blvd., (213) 937-5525. Hours: Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m. The exhibition continues through June 17.