John Coplans

John Coplans photographs are to some extent the opposite of glamorising the human body.  The large scale of the black and white images are some what a trophy, due to the fact that the hands and limbs are placed in the centre therefore pulling the focus of the image straight to the hand itself.  "The impressive formality of Coplans’s images – their often symmetrical design, their textures, the absorbing interplay of light and shade, and of physical projection and recession – is complicated at every turn by a suspicion that they are trying, like distant semaphores, to tell us something."  The spaces between the limb and the edge of the picture is very limited and even no spaces at all.  "Coplans doesn’t exactly discourage the revelation of beauty."  I can use these techniques for my images, with no spaces between the edge of the picture and the hand itself.