Audio Tour - Facing the Lens

Harrison Photography Gallery 365

1203 - John Coplans
Film in the Cities, Saint Paul, MN, October 27, 1985

Lee Friedlander
American, born 1934
John Coplans, 1983
Gelatin silver print
The William Hood Dunwoody Fund 85.91.7

John Coplans was a photographer, critic, and curator. He immigrated to the United States from England in 1960 and shortly thereafter began working on the editorial staff at the new magazine, Artforum, where he stayed until 1977. He was a curator at the Pasadena Art Museum in the mid-1960s, where he was among the earliest champions of Pop Art, and later at the Akron Art Museum. His most well known photographs, dating from the 1980s, picture his own faceless, naked, and aging body, haunting in their boldness.