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With these black-and-white photographs, Joseph Maida reflects on the history of the body in Western Art, with a particular interest in Lee Friedlander’s nudes from the 1970’s and 80’s. Maida reinterprets that work, originally shown at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1991, as a present-day homage to bodies across gender and identity spectra. To picture the nude anew, Maida draws upon visualizations of all bodies, predating the invention of photography, to connect the past to the present for a vision of the future. In the book’s introduction
La Bella Figura, Maida provides a personal and cultural account to contextualize this new series with nods to an education in photography at Yale University with prominent figures including Richard Benson, Catherine Opie, and John Szarkowski
. Celebrated artist and Emmy-nominated producer, Zackary Drucker, one of Maida’s earliest students, also lends her discerning voice for the book's foreword
The (Un)Certainty of Seeing.
Con queste fotografie in bianco e nero, Joseph Maida riflette sulla storia della rappresentazione del corpo umano nell'arte occidentale, con particolare interesse per i nudi di Lee Friedlander degli anni '70 e '80. Maida reinterpreta quel lavoro, originariamente esposto al Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) di New York nel 1991, come un omaggio dei giorni nostri al corpo umano, illustrato attraverso tutta la gamma di identità di genere. Per raffigurare il nudo in modo diverso, Maida attinge a rappresentazioni visuali di corpi umani, anche antecedenti all'invenzione della fotografia, per collegare il passato al presente e lanciare uno sguardo al futuro. Nell'introduzione del libro,
La Bella Figura, Maida fornisce un resoconto personale e culturale per contestualizzare questa nuova serie di fotografie, con cenni alla sua formazione in campo fotografico, a Yale University, sotto la guida di figure di spicco tra cui Richard Benson, Catherine Opie e John Szarkowski. Zackary Drucker, famosa artista e produttrice nominata agli Emmy e anche uno dei primi studenti di Maida, presta la sua voce, perspicace come sempre, per la stesura della prefazione del libro
L’(In)certezza del Vedere.
About the author
Joseph Maida is an artist, writer, and educator, who chairs the BFA Photography and Video Department at New York's School of Visual Arts. Maida has exhibited his work extensively in the United States, Europe, Japan and China in solo exhibitions at Wallspace, Daniel Cooney Fine Art, the Nikon Salons, Tokyo and Osaka, and 403 International Art Center, Wuhan, among others. Maida's work has also been included in group exhibitions in New York at the International Center for Photography (ICP); Yancey Richardson Gallery; Art in General; Artists Space; the Queens Museum; and the Bronx Museum and internationally at Foam Fotografiemuseum, Amsterdam; the Reina Sofia Museum, Madrid; the Kunsthalle Wien; the Witte de With, Rotterdam; C/O Berlin; and the Photographers' Gallery, London, among others. Maida's commissioned work has appeared in publications such as
The New York Times Magazine,
New York Magazine,
W,
Wallpaper*, and
Vice, and Maida's monographs
New Natives and
Born Free and Equal were published by L'Artiere (Bologna, Italy) in 2015 and CONVOKE (New York, NY) in 2018 respectively. Maida earned his BA
summa cum laude in architecture and art history from Columbia University and his MFA in photography from Yale University.
Summary
In A Third Look, Joseph Maida reflects on Lee Friedlander’s nudes from the 1970’s and 80’s, reinterpreting this series as a cutting edge homage both to Friedlander, the modernist titan of photography, and to LGBTQIA+ bodies across gender and identity spectra.
When curator John Szarkowski first presented Friedlander’s nudes in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1991, he wrote that "the qualities of generosity and openness, and the habit of continual exploration—of logical extemporization enlivened by an unassuming audacity" make Friedlander’s nudes so "richly and rewardingly complex." Maida, viewing the traits of openness, exploration, extemporization, and audacity as queerness itself, reimagined Friedlander’s nudes by picturing different bodies in A Third Look to converse with Friedlander’s. Maida calls their feminist reclamation of history "a visual queering of modernist photography, providing a visible reconciliation of where the canon of art photography has historically allowed us to see" with the broader spectrum of the human nude.
Foreword
- Artist conversation with Zackery Drucker, the trans activist and producer, at SVA Theatre in April 2022 as well as other talks and signings at Independent bookshops.
- Work will be exhibited at Paris Photo November 2022
- NYTimes has agreed to a visual op-ed piece around the publication
- A Social Media campaign targeting museums, galleries, and collectors who are choosing to exclude the work in their current dialogues involving the artist’s legacy
- Have Lee Friedlander’s spouse, write an op-ed on the book in relation to Friendlander’s Family book.
