Gary Schneider: Portraits

"That is what all my work is-looking at things really up close."
- Gary Schneider

New York artist Gary Schneider (b. 1954 in South Africa) lives inside his own metaphoric microscope, focusing on worlds of his own making, examining evidence of what he calls the "layered narrative of my life as subject." Gary Schneider: Portraits explores how, over the past nearly three decades, this compulsion for self-examination has led the artist to reinterpret the parameters of the portrait photograph in a remarkably diverse series of projects.

Schneider takes his reassessment of the portrait genre to extremes in conceptual fragment portraits that record and make public private scripted actions; voyeuristic independent films; the astonishingly vivid reinterpretation of diminutive nineteenth-century studio portraits; long-exposure face portraits intended to subvert the tendency of contemporary sitters to assume a contrived pose for the camera; sublime photograms printed from negatives impregnated with sweat and body heat from his or others' hands and displayed as surrogate portraits; and portraits printed from negatives recording biological specimens made by scientists.

Pushing the medium to its limits, his images reveal as much about the language of photography as they do about the subjects being photographed.

Also at play throughout Schneider's work is his interest in the relativism of what is presented as objective information in the visual arts and in science. The concept is most fully realized in his Genetic Self-Portrait, (199798) an installation that represents the artistÕs unique response to the Human Genome Project. Greatly manipulating the prints he made from the specimen-negatives prepared by scientists, Schneider interpreted his own biological, forensic, and genetic fact with a decidedly pictorial eye, creating a compelling synthesis and collision of scientific and artistic methods and viewpoints.

Reduced to its most essential element, much of SchneiderÕs photography is the afterimage of an improvisational performance between artist and subject, the slow sculpting of the visage with a light pen over long exposures, the pressing of the sweating hand onto photographic film, the collaboration with scientists to create negatives of blood, DNA, and hair.

Schneider's resulting prints transform their specific subject matter and probe the enigmatic character of identity. Rather than picturing the apparent verisimilitude of his subject, Schneider maps traces of corporeality in images that are as conceptually challenging as they are visually compelling.

Adapted from a text by Deborah Martin Kao, Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography, Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University Art Museums

Gary Schneider: Portraits was organized by the Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

A catalogue copublished by Harvard University Art Museums with Yale University Press accompanies the exhibition and is available in The Contemporary Museum Shop.