A Body of Work: Self Portraits by John Coplans

John Coplans

A Body of Work: Self Portraits by John Coplans

New York City, USA: Printed Matter, 1987

[50] pp, 23 x 23 cm., softcover

Edition size unknown

John Coplans was a British artist, writer, curator, museum director and former Editor-in-Chief of Artforum magazine. As an artist, he is best known for this series of frank photographs of his own aging naked body (he was in his mid-sixties when they were taken).  

 “I don’t know how it happens, but when I pose for one of these photographs, I become immersed in the past...I am somewhere else, another person, or a woman in another life. At times, I’m in my youth,” he wrote in the 2002 book A Body, published a year before his death.

In writings more contemporaneous to the publication of this artist book, he wrote "I photograph my body, I generalise it by beheading myself to make my body more like any other man's. Nakedness removes the body from the specificity of time. Unclothed, 1t belongs to the past, present, and future. It is classless, without country, unencumbered by language and free to wander across cultures at will."

A Body of Work contains no text, other than the captions for the twenty-four Polaroid positive/negative 4x5 images that appear. Bound in printed stiff white French fold paper covers, the book is sometimes listed as published by Printed Matter, and other times as self-published but distributed by Printed Matter. Like the artist's prints, the book was printed by the Meriden-Stinehour Press, Meriden, Connecticut.

An exhibition of the same name opened at The Museum of Modern Art, on April 23, 1988 [see below]. The works were selected by Susan Kismaric, curator 1n the Department of Photography, from an exhibition organized by Sandra S. Phillips, curator of photography, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

"In 1984 John Coplans (b. 1920) began the compelling series of nude self-portraits presented in this exhibition. Coplans posed himself naked against a blank white wall while observing the positions of his body in a video monitor. When he found the composition he wanted, a studio assistant made the exposure on Polaroid negative film. The process continued in the darkroom, where Coplans created the picture by cropping the negative and making a large-scale print. The resulting photographs are an intimate yet impersonal way to deal with the Issue of aging and the objective fact of his own body.”

- MoMA press release