This is not a degraded body but another body that just is… not the physicality of the body and certainly not my body as a temple, but an anti-commercial body, one that states that this is what we inevitably will become, despite our attempts to keep our beauty and attain immortality.
I can also feel — sense, that Coplans work of the body is a tone poem, a piece of music typically of one movement on a descriptive theme. We can know the phenomenal the world of representation but all we can ever do is intimate the noumenal world, the unknowable noumenon as an entity to which we can directly relate but can never know we can know of death but never experience it.
Many thankx to the Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
A formal and fearless photographer, Coplans uses his naked body as the sole material for his sensual, disconcerting, radical and personal compositions. Comprised of original works on loan from numerous French institutions and private lenders, this exhibition breaks new ground for the Fondation HCB, with a rare bird from the history of photography.
Works on show here, on loan from French collections, testify to the audacity of this British artist, known for uncompromising representations of his body. Coplans, who emigrated to the United States at the start of the s, was at first painter, art critic, museum director and curator before devoting himself fully to photography in the early s.
