Gary Schneider: Portraits

The first major study of Gary Schneider (b. 1954), the South African-born New York photographer whose long-exposure, flashlight-drawn portraits reimagine photographic likeness as a record of time and collaboration.

Written by Deborah Martin Kao, the Richard L. Menschel Curator of Photography at Harvard's Fogg Art Museum, the catalogue traces two decades of Schneider's portrait work: his re-presentations of nineteenth-century studio negatives, his life-size handprint photograms, and his fragmented face portraits, made by moving a light pen across a sitter's features during exposures that can last more than an hour. Kao also examines the scientific collaborations behind his images of blood, DNA, and hair, and closes with an extended interview with the artist. Yale University Press published it in association with the Harvard University Art Museums to accompany the retrospective at the Arthur M. Sackler Museum (28 February to 23 May 2004). Paperback, 122 pages, with 103 color and 49 black-and-white plates.

Schneider trained at the Michaelis School of Fine Art in Cape Town and at Pratt Institute, and has lived in New York since 1977, where in 1981 he co-founded the master printing lab Schneider/Erdman. His Genetic Self-Portrait (1998) and ongoing Nudes series pushed portraiture toward science and abstraction, and his work is held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. He printed for many photographers, among them Peter Hujar, whose negatives are the subject of his 2024 memoir Peter Hujar: Behind the Camera and In the Darkroom.