John Coplans’s A Body is devoted to nude self-portraiture, with the photographer serving as both author and subject. Published by powerHouse Books in 2002, the book concentrates on the human body without separating the act of looking from the artist’s own physical presence. Its concise title establishes the central tension: this is one particular body, examined through self-portraiture, yet also a body considered as a broader photographic subject.

Coplans had previously published abbreviated selections from these portraits in catalogues and smaller-format books. A Body was conceived as the first publication to present the work at the sustained scale of an oversized monograph. That change of format is consequential. Rather than encountering a limited group of reproductions, the reader is given an extended study that moves across, around and into the body’s visible forms, allowing individual photographs to participate in a larger examination.

The publication’s significance therefore lies not simply in its subject but in the degree of concentration it brings to it. Photographer and photographed remain inseparable, complicating familiar distinctions between nude study and self-portrait. The book asks the reader to attend to corporeal presence over the duration of a substantial volume, rather than treating the body as a single image, symbol or conventional likeness.

This 160-page, clothbound hardcover is the first edition of the monograph. For a serious photobook collection, its importance rests on the relationship between subject and publication form: a body of self-portraits previously encountered in abbreviated form is gathered here for a fuller, large-scale reading. A Body merits attention as a focused statement of Coplans’s approach and as a considered example of how the monograph can give coherence and duration to a photographic project.