John Coplans

For over five decades, John Coplans was a painter, magazine editor, and museum director. The photographs he began making of his naked body in 1984 are in the collections of over 90 prestigious institutions world-wide. A founding editor of Artforum, Coplans became the editor-in-chief in 1971. His photographs, are mythic in scope and unflinching in their examination of one person’s humanness and mortality. Coplans transcended the boundaries of photography as an art. He used his own headless body as his subject matter and as his medium to investigate every inch and every idea about his maleness. Epic, grotesque, bittersweet, funny, sensual, poignant, provocative and sometimes even absurd, Coplans achieved a visual meditation on the compelling relationship between sex, aging, and death that is unparalleled in the history of the medium. Born in London in 1920, Coplans died in New York City in 2003.