William Coupon: Portraits

Announcing: WILLIAM COUPON: PORTRAITS

Book Signing & Artist Reception: Saturday, December 8, 2018 5–7 PM
On View: October 26th, 2018 – January 5, 2019

photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space
1300 Rufina Circle, Suite A3
Santa Fe, NM 87505
–View Map for Directions–

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

photo-eye Bookstore’s Project Space is excited to announce William Coupon: Portraits, a solo exhibition featuring images of notable cultural icons dating back to the 1970s by celebrated Santa Fe-based photographer William Coupon. The exhibition corresponds with Coupon’s long-awaited monograph of the same title published earlier this year by Damiani. William Coupon: Portraits will be on view from Friday, October 27th, 2018 through January 5th, 2019.

» View the Work

Jean Michel Basquiat, Artist, New York City. 1986

ABOUT THE ARTWORK

For more than 40 years William Coupon has photographed an astonishing array of esteemed artists, politicians, athletes, and intellectuals, including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Carter, and Mohammed Ali among many others. Inspired by classic portrait painters such as Rembrandt and Holbein, Coupon’s signature style places his subject against a hand-painted backdrop lit by a single oblique light source. This rich chiaroscuro lends Coupon’s portraits a dynamic weight while focusing our attention on his sitters’ expressions and engagement with the camera. The results are captivating. As an exhibition, William Coupon: Portraits acts as a kind of time capsule examining the personalities who have helped shape the last half-century.

"I was always inspired by travel, by culture, by faces – for some reason, I have been drawn to formal portraits and their relationship to painting. I became interested in formal studio portraits in 1979 while observing its lower Manhattan youth, my peers, and its present counter-culture, and decided early on to use a single light source and simple mottled backdrop as a studio style. My first thought was to photograph everyone in the world in formal portraits, on my backdrop."

— William Coupon

Keith Haring, Artist, New York City. 1988

ABOUT THE ARTIST

William Coupon is an acclaimed portrait and documentary photographer whose career began in the late 1970s. His images have appeared on countless magazine covers for publications such as Time, Newsweek, Rolling Stone, Esquire, and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, and has won numerous awards for assignment work appearing in the Washington Post, People, The Los Angeles Times, and The Economist among others. He has exhibited extensively internationally including at the Grey Art Gallery, New York University; Arizona State University Art Museum; Hotel de Ville, Paris; Gallery Art and Commerce, Amsterdam; and SGR Gallery in Bogota, Colombia. In 1992, Coupon was invited to photograph the world’s tribal leaders during Earth Summit, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He was asked by the United Nations and the United States Congress to exhibit this work in the United States Senate Rotunda, as part of the UN’s Year of Indigenous Peoples. William Coupon currently lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

William Coupon: Portraits

Photographs by William Coupon.
Text by Anthony Bannon.
Foreword by Walter Isaacson.
Damiani, Bologna, Italy, 2018. 216 pp., 150 color illustrations, 11½x12½".

Order Copies
Hardbound [Signed]: $60.00

photo-eye Bookstore + Project Space
1300 Rufina Circle, Suite A3
Santa Fe, NM 87505
–View Map for Directions–

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