After a long and influential career as a writer, curator and founding editor of Artforum and Dialogue magazines, John Coplans turned to photography in the early 1980s to create a series of stark, nude self-portraits. He continued to photograph himself in the decades after his sixtieth birthday. His photographic work has become an integral part of contemporary discourse on the human body in art, culture and society.
Born in 1920 during a visit to London by his South African parents, Coplans was educated in Cape Town and Johannesburg. He dropped out of high school and went to England where, at the age of 18, he volunteered for military service and became a pilot at the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939. After suffering a head injury, he volunteered for ground duty in 1940 and was stationed in Africa and later in Burma and India. His military career continued with three years in Ethiopia, leading African troops as an infantry captain.
Coplans lived and fought alongside the African soldiers, learning to speak Swahili and adapting to the customs and traditions of their culture. Later in life, he would cite these experiences as contributing to what he described as a sublime understanding of humanity.
But when the war ended, he was a young man of 26 who found that his eight years in the military had robbed him of his youth and any trace of formal education.
In post-war London, Coplans turned to artistic pursuits and took up painting. After seeing an exhibition of contemporary American painting at the Tate Gallery in 1956, he came to the conclusion that artistic innovation in Europe had come to a standstill.
Coplans moved to the United States in 1960, first to New York and then to San Francisco. In America, he would embark on a multifaceted career as a painter, museum director, art critic and writer.
While living in San Francisco, Coplans painted, exhibited and taught, but the critical neglect of the West Coast art scene led him to co-found Artforum magazine in 1962, which would become the leading magazine on contemporary art in the 1970s. He eventually abandoned his career as a painter and moved to Southern California, accepting appointments as director of the University of California, Irvine Art Gallery in 1965 and senior curator of the Pasadena Art Museum in 1967. He was an integral part of the group around the now legendary Ferus Gallery, which introduced the emerging group of Los Angeles-based artists, including Ed Ruscha. He also taught at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Chouinard Art Institute, and wrote for numerous art journals. As a curator, he organised the first museum exhibitions of works by Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Serra, Judy Chicago and Andy Warhol. His book on the latter is a classic of contemporary art scholarship. He has also published monographs on contemporary artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Donald Judd and Roy Lichtenstein.
In 1971, Coplans took over as editor-in-chief of Artforum, the magazine he’d founded, which had moved to New York City. Working at the publication during what might be called its post-minimalist phase, he published seminal essays by critics and scholars including Rosalind Krauss, Max Kozloff and Annette Michelson. Dismissed from the magazine in 1976, Coplans accepted a position in the Midwest as director of the Akron Art Institute in Ohio, a post he held from 1977 to 1979. While staging a series of exhibitions featuring the work of major contemporary artists in an attempt to appeal to the region’s working-class audiences, Coplans also exhibited forms that were not at the time considered suitable for display in art museums, including Amish quilts and antique jukeboxes.
As in California, Coplans saw the need for a forum in the Midwest for artists, curators, and art critics to discuss and promote their work and exhibitions, especially the work of regional artists. With the help of artist Don Harvey, who was gallery director at the University of Akron, he founded the Midwest art magazine Dialogue. Coplans asked museums, art centres and universities with galleries to publish essays and reviews of their exhibitions in Dialogue. The publication gave curators an opportunity to write about regional artists who were not covered by the major East and West Coast publications.
Coplan’s interest in photography expanded in the 1970s. Earlier in his career, he had rediscovered the work of nineteenth-century landscape photographer Carleton Watkins and became an avid collector and promoter of his work. Coplan’s continuing interest in photography led him to organise several exhibitions, as well as teaching himself the technical aspects of the medium with the help of his friend Lee Friedlander. He organized the first American exhibitions of John Heartfield’s photomontages and the photographs of sculptor Constantin Brancusi, and in 1978 he organized a retrospective of Weegee’s photography for the International Center of Photography in New York. Coplans abandoned his writing and curatorial career to devote himself exclusively to the art of photography. His last critical essay on the work of Philip Guston was published in 1980.
In the early 1980s, Coplans turned to the subject for which he is best known: his own body. With the help of an assistant, Coplans creates compositions of large, close-up shots – of his hands, fingers and feet, his back, etc. – that focus on formal qualities such as line, surface, texture and form.
These qualities can be seen in an early work entitled Self-Portrait (Feet, Frontal), 1984, from his first group of photographs published as A Body of Work in 1987. Coplans would continue to explore the formal qualities of the human figure, often revealing the abstract qualities of the body as well as the sheer mass and weight of the figure, as in Self-Portrait (Torso Front), both from 1984.
In his photographs, however, Coplans goes beyond the mere formal investigation of the human form. He presents his body as a timeless subject, subverting the Western art tradition of the nude as the embodiment of beauty and youth. Coplans’ Self-Portrait (Frieze No. 4, Three Panels), 1994, consists of nine separate photographs that present an overview of his body from shoulder to knee, from three different angles: right, back and left. Coplans presents his own physical topography in an attempt to reveal humanity in its most primal sense. He remarked: “I got the idea that my body was everyone’s body. Just as my genes were the genes of the whole human race, shared with them. […] My photographs became raceless and timeless and about the whole of humanity. It’s not (only) about the exterior. It’s also about the genetic past of humanity and what we share.”
The images also raise critical questions about societal responses to age, and Coplans commented: “The main thing is the question of how our culture views age: that old is ugly. Think of Rodin, how he dealt with people of all ages. I feel I’m alive, I’ve got a body. I can make it extremely interesting. It keeps me alive and vital. It’s a kind of process of energising myself with my belief that the classical tradition of art that we’ve inherited from the Greeks is a load of bullshit.”
After a career as a writer, curator and editor, Coplans turned to photography in later life, focusing on the commonality of the human form. By greatly magnifying only one part of the human body in his photographs, he emphasised the similarities shared by all, rather than the differences (such as the face).
Coplans developed this technique to de-emphasise youth, (especially) beauty, race and the prevailing idea of perfection by never photographing the whole body. In his images, Coplans expressed his belief that a detailed image of himself was actually an image of every human being, all connected by a common genetics, with age being an insignificant factor.
