John Coplans

My most recent work on Nude Naked is a rather dramatic change in both the subject matter and the method  in which I usually take photographs. It's all very new and different for me, but I'm finding that very exciting and inspiring, and hence am eager to continue it further. A photographer's work who is very pivotal in this area is that of John Coplans.

Coplans spent many years photographing his own naked ageing body in as honest and unflattering a manner as possible. He doesn't take himself seriously with this work, but instead laughs at himself, and adopts a cynical approach to the perceived ugliness of old age. His face never appears because he doesn't wish the work to have any reference to his identity, but rather to be a universal portrayal of humanity. He wishes to challenge the negative opinions towards the appearance of ageing.

"I'm not dealing with a perfect body, I'm dealing with another kind of truth - that is how the body is. And why don't we accept it because that's our norm?"

I am very drawn to the frankness and the humour of his images. As well as holding the pictures in high regard, I also think Coplans speaks brilliantly about his work, and so I've included a couple of quotes from Channel 4's series on taboo photography - Vile Bodies. Some of the points he makes are very relevant to where I'm thinking of developing my own work.

"I'm a terminal man reflecting on being a terminal man, but I don't really deal with old age per se. It's merely a condition that I'm in that I have to make use of as best I can. I pretend to be young. I want to be as young as I can because I want to be like every man."

"It's a timeless space, there's nothing that connects it to today, no hint that connects it to a contemporary event, except the mere fact that it's a photograph. ... My photos are pre-linguistic, they're not to do with language, they're to do with being, conditions of being, which have nothing to do with our modern idea of language or communication."

"It's all about perception. The world has a certain size or scale through us, through the relationship of our body and our eyes to it. But when I take a camera and I take it very close, suddenly it's transformed; and I shoot a hand, I do this and it becomes a woman, I do something like this and it becomes some primitive sexual organ. We see everything in a way which we have accumulated, which is a norm; and the moment we focus on parts of the body, then we've changed the scale of how we see - which is one of the things that interests me enormously. I photograph my chest - my hairy chest and my two nipples - and isolated it becomes a face. So in changing the scale of how we see with the camera, there's a slippage occurring, what I've taken looks like something else and I haven't done anything except change the scale. It's a transforming process, they are what they are, and they aren't what they are."