Gary Schneider: facing time: using a lengthy exposure and a handheld flashlight to illuminate his subjects, photographer Gary Schneider creates large-format portraits—holistic body vistas, each of which is also the record of a performance

Art in America, Feb, 2005 by Trevor Fairbrother

This essay is drawn from my lecture of the same name delivered at the symposium "Aspects of Contemporary Photography," Harvard University Art Museums, Mar. 13, 2004. For their help with this project I am most grateful to Michael Dumas, Alexis Dunfee, John Erdman, Deborah Martin Kao, John T. Kirk, Gary Schneider, Catherine Tedford and Howard Yezerski.

(1.) See Anne Thomas, "The Portrait in the Age of Genetic Mapping," in Gary Schneider, Genetic Self-Portrait, Syracuse, N.Y., Light Work, 1999. The first publications to feature this work included the New York Times Magazine, Oct. 17, 1999 (an issue titled "The Me Millennium," with a text on Schneider by John Noble Wilford), and William A. Ewing, The Century of the Body: 100 Photoworks, London, Thames & Hudson, 2000.

(2.) Deborah Martin Kao, Gary Schneider: Portraits, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Art Museums, 2004.

(3.) For an illustration see Kao, pl. 4.

(4.) Quoted in Kao, p. 105.

(5.) "From Desire" featured a broad range of art by 39 artists, including Nayland Blake, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Peter Hujar, Deborah Kass, Greer Lankton, Zoe Leonard, Siobhan Liddell, Jack Pierson and David Wojnarowicz.

(6.) Elizabeth Hess, "Gary Schneider," The Village Voice, June 16, 1992, p. 91.

(7.) Gary Schneider, "Statement on Carte de Visite," P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, April 1991.

(8.) Quoted in Vincent Katz, "Gary Schneider: An Interview," Print Collector's Newsletter, March-April, 1996, p. 13. When Schneider exhibited "Carte de Visite" at P.P.O.W. Gallery in 1991, Vince Aletti drew a connection with the neo-expressionist photographs of Mike and Doug Starn before stressing the singular power of Schneider's psychological questing: "Though the flawed surfaces suggest a Starnesque attack on the conventional image, the subjects--their yearning, wariness, contempt, or confusion preserved a century later--gaze out at us with a complicated humanity that's both eloquent and seductive." See the Village Voice, Apr. 16, 1991, p. 113.

(9.) Quoted in Katz, p. 13.

(10.) See catalogue entry by Harry Cooper in Stephan Wolohojian, ed., A Private Passion: 19th-Century Paintings and Drawings from the Grenville L. Winthrop Collection, Harvard University, New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2003, pp. 145-46.

(11.) See Schneider's comments on Julia Margaret Cameron in Katz, p. 12.

(12.) Comments made in 2002, quoted in Kao, p. 110; this catalogue (pp. 14, 108) illustrates two spirit photographs in Schneider's collection.

(13.) Holland Cotter, "Introduction," in Dorothy Abbott Thompson, Hyman Bloom, New York, Chameleon Books, 1996, p. 9.

(14.) Quoted in Lynne Tillman, "Counting Time: Photographs by Gary Schneider," Aperture, no. 176, 2004, p. 39.

(15.) Calvin Tomkins, "Time to Think," in Robert Wilson: The Theater of Images, Cincinnati, Contemporary Arts Center, and New York, Harper & Row, 1984, p. 55. (This essay first appeared in the New Yorker, Jan. 13, 1975.) Note also that Erdman collaborated with Peter Campus on a film installation titled Head of a Man with Death on His Mind (1978, Whitney Museum of American Art). The only shot is a close-up of Erdman's heavily shadowed face; the uncut footage shows him maintaining an eerie stillness for 12 minutes, until he can no longer hold his pose.