John Coplans

John Coplans (June 24, 1920 in London-August 21, 2003 in New York) was a British artist and photographer who immigrated to the United States in 1960 and exhibited extensively in Europe and North America. He was on the editorial staff of the journal Artforum from 1962 to 1971, and was editor-in-chief of the magazine from 1971 to 1977. He was the director of several museums including the Akron Museum of Art, Ohio. In 1980 he moved to New York where he began to focus on photography. Coplans is famous for his series of black and white self-portraits which are rather crude studies of the naked and aging body. He photographed her unadorned body, slicing it into sections, from feet to wrinkled hands. The result of thirteen years of work, from 1984 to 1997, is the poetic portrait of a man as a bodily entity, each part becoming the story of the artist.