John Coplans often fragments and distorts the human body in his work, transforming the figure into something alternately alien and abstract. When Coplans took up photography in 1980 at the age of sixty, having already worked for many years as a painter, teacher, critic, curator, and museum director, his focus was his own aging body-posed against a neutral background and isolated and cropped so that the parts are often nearly unrecognizable. His extensive series of naked, rather than nude, studies never include his head or face, challenging our notions of self-portraiture and our celebration of the idealized human form. Here, two of Coplans's fingers, greatly enlarged and shown extremely close-up, take on the look of a torso, buttocks, and legs, with their wrinkled texture suggesting something almost more animal than human.

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