gray to more medium gray, shadows appear, again
imparting detail, shape, and content to the photo-
graphic image.
Finding a style is just that. Deciding what contrast
a photograph should contain depends upon the
tastes of the photographer, the purpose for which
the photo will be used, and the methods employed to
produce the photo. Currently there is a huge transi-
tion to electronic or digital photography, which
allows for contrast adjustment, hue and saturation
changes, and brightness or darkness to be infinitely
altered by computer. This should be seen as a new
and powerful tool, just as the advent of variable
contrast paper must have seemed to those darkroom
technicians limited to one grade of paper.
Regardless of the techniques employed to create
and adjust the contrast and tonality of the print,
awareness of contrast and how it affects the viewer
is essential. Whether in color printing, black and
white printing, alternative process printing, or in
digital printing the attractiveness and beauty of
the final product will rest on contrast and how it
is employed.
LambertMcLaurinSeealso: Darkroom; Digital Photography; Emul-
sion; Film; Film: High-Contrast; FiltersJOHN COPLANS
American
After a long and influential career as a writer,
curator, and founding editor ofArtforumanddia-
logueart magazines, John Coplans turned to the
medium of photography in the early 1980s to create
a series of stark, nude self-portraits. He continued
to photograph himself in the decades following his
sixtieth birthday. His photographic work has
become an integral part of contemporary discourse
on the subject of the human body in art, culture,
and society.
Born on a visit to London by his South African
parents in 1920, Coplans was schooled in Cape
Town and Johannesburg. He dropped out of high
school and made his way to England, where at the
age of 18 he volunteered for military service,
becoming a pilot in 1939 at the outbreak of
World War II. After suffering a head injury, he
volunteered for ground duty in 1940 and was sta-
tioned in Africa and later Burma and India. His
military career continued with three years in Ethio-
pia and leading African troops as an infantry cap-
tain. Coplans lived and fought alongside the
African soldiers, learning to speak Swahili and
acclimating to the customs and traditions of their
culture. Later in his life, he would cite these experi-
ences as contributing to his attaining what he
described as a sublime understanding of humanity.
But when the war ended, he was a young man of 26
who found that his eight years spent in the military
had robbed him of his youth and any trace of a
formal education.
Coplans turned to artistic endeavors in postwar
London and took up painting. After seeing an exhi-
bition of contemporary American painting at the
Tate Gallery in 1956, he came to the conclusion
that artistic innovation in Europe had stalled.
Coplans relocated to the United States in 1960, mov-
ing first to New York and then to San Francisco. In
America, he would embark on a multifaceted career
as a painter, museum director, art critic, and writer.
While living in San Francisco, Coplans painted,
exhibited, and taught, but critical neglect of the
West Coast art scene led him in 1962 to co-found
Artforummagazine, which was to become in the
1970s the premier contemporary art journal. Even-
tually, he abandoned his career as a painter, and
moved to Southern California accepting an
appointment as the Director of the art gallery at
the University of California, Irvine in 1965 and
later Senior Curator of the Pasadena Art MuseumCONTRAST