Coplans was a British artist, he was an art writer, a curator, a photographer and also a museum director. He emigrated to the United States in 1960 and held many exhibitions in Europe and North America.
Coplans is well known for his series of black and white self portraits which portray his own ageing naked body, he depicts segments of his naked body to photograph however he never includes his face within these photographs, Coplans images are not focused on a specific man nor identity. Even though he is an old man with an ageing body with wrinkles he still manages to create beautiful images. When Coplans poses for these images he becomes immersed in the past and believes he is somewhere else, another person, or a women in another life, he feels very youthful when posing.
The technique he uses for making these photographs involves a polaroid positive/negative 4×5 film, so he could automatically see the results of his poses and then make immediate adjustments. He then later on decided to us a video camera connected to a television monitor to see the back of the 4×5 camera for an even more immediate mirror effect. Using the video camera depended a lot of accuracy and control.
In Coplans photography he portrays his images to be very beautiful and interesting and he says he feels alive when taking the series of images. Being a seventy year old man naked in these images this is something many people have not seen before, and it is a neglected subject matter. So he has taken images of his own body to show his audience that even though he is seventy years old and has wrinkles that he can still make it interesting and still show beauty within the images.
When it comes to art we mainly see women that tend to be naked and more on the slimmer side, this also happened within art history. So seeing images of a naked man is very different and can be strange to some people, however I find them very powerful and beautiful. He depicts how life is reflected in the body with the marks, the scars bruising and many more.
When displaying his work in galleries he loved to listen to what people had to say about his work as no one knew that the body in the photographs were him.
