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Self-Portrait Three Times

Creator

British Photographer · 1920–2003

Author

Following a career as a teacher, curator, and editor, John Coplans took up photography full-time at age sixty. He began painting as a young man, after a tour of duty in the British Armed Forces during World War II. In 1960 he immigrated to the United States, where he settled in San Francisco and taught at the University of California, Berkeley. Two years later, he founded the periodical *Artforum*

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Date: 1987
Medium: Diffusion print
Culture: British
Department: Photographs
Institution: Getty Museum

Aging and hairy, the photographer's nude body is presented in this triple-exposure in two profile views and one frontal view. It is a vulnerable revelation of the body's imperfections rendered in graphic detail. John Coplans has cropped his body across the upper chest and lower legs, emphasizing his torso, with its folds and spots made more severe by the deep shadows cast by the harsh, unforgiving lighting. Like a latter-day Three Graces composition, the multiple bodies interact in a dance-like posture, bending forward and back, legs extended in motion and carefully posed in side-by-side symmetry.

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