Photograph, black and white, on paper
Tate Collection
Works with images
General Collection
Tate American Fund
Collection
<a href="https://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/john-coplans-2353" aria-label="More by John Coplans" data-gtm-name="header_link_artist" data-gtm-destination="page--artist">John Coplans</a>
SelfPortrait Hands Spread on Knees
Presented by the American Fund for the Tate Gallery, courtesy of Marsha Plotnitsky 2000
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<p>These photos were taken by the artist John Coplans of his own gnarled and wrinkled body.</p><p>Although they are self-portraits, Coplans doesn't show his face. Instead he focuses on isolated body parts such as hands  and feet, showing them enlarged  and close-up, so that they seem  at once familiar and unfamiliar.  Coplans' monumental images recall classical sculpture, whilst emphasising the relentless progression of the  aging process.</p><p><em>Gallery label, August 2004</em></p>
paper print photograph black white
28 October 2002 – 5 January 2003
2003-01-05
Tate Britain (London, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/
2002-10-28
Self Evident
Collection based display
6 June 2007 – 9 September 2007
2007-09-09
6 June 2007 – 9 September 2007
2007-09-09
2007-06-06
Scottish National Portrait Gallery (Edinburgh, UK)
29 September 2007 – 9 December 2007
2007-12-09
2007-09-29
Compton Verney (Compton Verney, UK)
2007-06-06
Naked Portrait
Loan-out
1 May 2009 – 31 May 2010
2010-05-31
1 May 2009 – 31 May 2010
2010-05-31
2009-05-01
Tate Liverpool (Liverpool, UK)
http://www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/
2009-05-01
Performing Sculpture
Collection based display
Self-Portrait (Hands Spread on Knees)
image: 968 × 1108 mm
Presented by the <a href="/search?gid=999999976" data-gtm-name="tombstone_link_bequest" data-gtm-destination="list-page--search-results">American Fund for the Tate Gallery</a>, courtesy of Marsha Plotnitsky 2000
<p>This is a black and white <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/photograph" title="Glossary definition for 'Photograph'"><span>photograph</span></a> of the artist’s knees over which he has placed his hands. The photograph was taken at the level of the knees, viewing them directly from the front. Coplans’s fingers are spread over his kneecaps, his hands touching at the thumbs and index fingers. The skin at the joint of his knuckles appears stretched. The image is tightly cropped, ending at the artist’s wrists at the upper edge and the bottom of his knees at the lower edge. A narrow margin of white background on either side of the legs frames the body. Thick black hair covering the artist’s legs curls off his skin and contrasts sharply with the white ground. Massively enlarged, the depicted body parts become like a <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/l/landscape" title="Glossary definition for 'Landscape'"><span>landscape</span></a> of skin texture and body contours. The silver gelatin <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/print" title="Glossary definition for 'Print'"><span>print</span></a> has the sharp qualities of an <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/e/etching" title="Glossary definition for 'Etching'"><span>etching</span></a>, emphasising surface detail. Strong studio lighting has created dark shadows behind the wrists and in the space between the knees below the fingers, conferring a dramatic atmosphere.
<br/>
<br/>Born in London, Coplans initially trained as a painter and moved to the United States in 1960, the year after seeing an inspirational exhibition of <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/a/abstract-expressionism" title="Glossary definition for 'Abstract Expressionism'"><span>Abstract Expressionist</span></a> <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/painting" title="Glossary definition for 'Painting'"><span>painting</span></a>, <i>The New American Painting</i>, at the Tate Gallery. He stopped making paintings in the early 1960s, working as a teacher, curator, writer and editor and was intimately involved with the art magazine <i>Artforum </i>until the end of the 1970s. In 1979 he took up photography. He explained: ‘I decided to become a photographer because I wanted to go back to being an artist. I had had enough of art history, critics, museology ... I chose photography because I could not go back to painting ... photography ... is a <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/m/medium" title="Glossary definition for 'Medium'"><span>medium</span></a> to build an identity out of a composite personality, to find an artistic identity.’ (Quoted in <i>John Coplans: Self <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/portrait" title="Glossary definition for 'Portrait'"><span>Portrait</span></a>: Hand/Foot</i>, p.46.) Since 1984, his subject has been his own body. Central to Abstract Expressionism was a concern to express unconscious elements deep within the psyche. For Coplans, this relates to a kind of universal <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/primitivism" title="Glossary definition for 'Primitivism'"><span>primitivism</span></a>, which he has referred to as ‘being in touch genetically with the inheritance of mankind as an inner thing, something that we all have within. The genetic code has a memory embedded in it, a memory of our past ancestry ... when I began those photographs; I was very interested in this idea of genetic memory.’ (Quoted in Morris, p.75.) He began to think about the body as being able to express a language originating in a collective unconscious, something universal, primordial and direct. By photographing sections of his own body, but always excluding his face, Coplans divests it of a sense of wholeness. Cropped and dramatically enlarged, the parts of his body depicted in black and white recall the finely detailed photographs of the American landscape produced in the nineteenth century by Carleton Watkins (1829-1916). A long-time admirer of Watkins’s work, Coplans had sold his personal collection of thirty photographs by Watkins in order to finance his own photography in 1981. 
<br/>
<br/>Coplans uses a video camera and monitor to view parts of his body. Once he has selected an area, an assistant takes a photograph using positive/negative Polaroid film. This film creates instant images at the same time as a negative which may be used for later printing in large scale. Coplans deliberately avoids any kind of pose or gesture which may communicate a familiar message. Instead he focuses on more ambiguous physical properties, which are aestheticised by the way that he lights, crops and prints his photographs. While the fragmentation of a male body may recall such <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/classicism" title="Glossary definition for 'Classicism'"><span>Classical</span></a> <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/sculpture" title="Glossary definition for 'Sculpture'"><span>sculptures</span></a> as the <i>Belvedere Torso</i>
(1<span>st</span> century BC, Vatican Museums, Rome) and, more recently, <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/surrealism" title="Glossary definition for 'Surrealism'"><span>Surrealist</span></a> photographs such as <i>The Big Toe </i>1929 by Jacques-André Boiffard (1902-61), the presentation of a naked patriarchal body is traditionally taboo in Western culture. Presenting his ageing body as textured surface or surreal object rather than the locus of a thinking subject depersonalised rather than defined by his identity, Coplans subverts traditional self-portraiture and historical representation of the body in photography.
<br/>
<br/><i>Self Portrait (Hands Spread on Knees) </i>was produced in an <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/e/edition" title="Glossary definition for 'Edition'"><span>edition</span></a> of three (plus one artist’s <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/proof" title="Glossary definition for 'Proof'"><span>proof</span></a>) of which this is the second.
<br/>
<br/><b>Further reading:</b>
<br/><i>A Body: John Coplans</i>, New York 2001, reproduced p.18
<br/><i>John Coplans: Self Portrait: Hand/Foot</i>, exhibition catalogue, Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam 1990
<br/>Stuart Morgan, Frances Morris, <i>Rites of Passage: Art for the End of the Century</i>, Tate Gallery, London 1995, pp.74-87
<br/>
<br/>Elizabeth Manchester
<br/>May 2003
<br/>
<br/></p>

Summary
2005-09-15T00:00:00
summary
SHORT_TEXT
<p>
These photos were taken by the artist John Coplans of his own gnarled and wrinkled body.</p>
<p>
 </p>
<p>
Although they are self-<a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/p/portrait" title="Glossary definition for 'Portrait'"><span>portraits</span></a>, Coplans doesn't show his face. Instead he focuses on isolated body parts such as hands <br/>
and feet, showing them enlarged <br/>
and close-up, so that they seem <br/>
at once familiar and unfamiliar. <br/>
Coplans' monumental images recall <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/c/classicism" title="Glossary definition for 'Classicism'"><span>classical</span></a> <a class="glossarylinktopopup" data-gtm-destination="article-page" data-gtm-name="body_text_link" href="http://www.tate.org.uk/learn/online-resources/glossary/s/sculpture" title="Glossary definition for 'Sculpture'"><span>sculpture</span></a>, whilst emphasising the relentless progression of the <br/>
aging process.</p>
<p>
 </p>
Display caption
2004-08-18T00:00:00
display-caption
DISPLAY_CAPTION
adults arts and entertainment birth to death body Coplans, John emotions, concepts and ideas formal qualities hand leg man named individuals old age people photographer photographic portraits self-portraits society torso work and occupations