A Third Look - Joseph Maida

With these black-and-white photographs, Joseph Maida reflects on the history of the body in Western Art, with a particular interest in Lee Friedlander's nudes from the 1970's and 80's. Maida reinterprets that work, originally shown at New York's Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1991, as a present-day homage to bodies across gender and identity spectra. To picture the nude anew, Maida draws upon visualizations of all bodies, predating the invention of photography, to connect the past to the present for a vision of the future. In the book's introduction La Bella Figura, Maida provides a personal and cultural account to contextualize this new series with nods to an education in photography at Yale University with prominent figures including Richard Benson, Catherine Opie, and John Szarkowski. Celebrated artist and Emmy-nominated producer, Zackary Drucker, one of Maida's earliest students, also lends her discerning voice for the book's foreword The (Un)Certainty of Seeing.