Self-portrait (Seated Figure, No. 1), John Coplans

Exhibition Label: “Embodiment,” Nov-2005, Kate Meyer Artist, magazine editor, and museum director John Coplans began work in 1984, at age sixty-four, on an extended series of photographs of his own body. In these pictures, which he makes with the help of studio assistants, he refuses to flatter his own image. He exposes graying chest hair, a bulging belly, and sagging skin-all part of his age-distorted body. Archive Label 2003: Artist, magazine editor, and museum director, John Coplans began work in 1984, at age sixty-four, on an extended series of photographs of his own body. In these pictures, which he makes with the help of studio assistants, he refuses to flatter his own image. He exposes graying chest hair, a bulging belly, and sagging skin-all part of his age-distorted body. Coplan’s decision to take his own body as the subject of his work follows from performance and body art that came of age in the 1970s. It also comments upon the work of such modernist photographers as Edward Weston, who photographed nude women (lovers and models), but never nude men. Archive Label: Artist, magazine editor, and museum director John Coplans began work in 1984, at age sixty-four, on an extended series of photographs of his own body, which he makes with the help of studio assistants. In these pictures, Coplans refuses to flatter his own image, and draws attention to his age-distorted body by exposing graying chest hair, a bulging belly, and sagging skin. Although Coplans’s activity of acting out before the camera clearly refers to performance and body art, his unmanipulated use of the gelatin-silver-print process invokes instead the “straight” (unmanipulated) photography of the Modernist masters Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams. Coplans exploits this connection between his work and that of these earlier masters to call attention to their exclusive fascination with the nude female, rather than male, body.