The tradition of The Nude inherited by photography from painting and subsequently practiced by the ‘masters’ of Pictorialism and Modernism privileged the white male perspective and depicted the white female body naked and objectified. The Nude is not herself, but the embodiment of white male heteronormative desire.

Naked and The Nude brings together works from the Northlight Gallery Permanent Collection and the Solari Foundation Collection. The exhibition combines familiar themes like The Bather, Vanity, The Nude in nature or abstracted by the frame with feminist responses to these themes by Barbara DeGenevieve and Tamara Kaida, as well as documentary images including a selection from Larry Clark’s famous Tulsa portfolio that depicts Clark’s friends naked and shooting up.

The self-portrait images of featured photographers Granville Carroll, Tarrah Krajnak and Arno Rafael Minkkinen bring agency to the tradition and differentiate, respond, reject, transform, disrupt and expand the understanding of The Nude in photography.

Photographs from the last 50 years by Finnish-American photographer Arno Rafael Minkkinen are at times playful, harrowing, breathtaking, or peaceful. Minkkinen’s contorted human figure toys with perspective and reflections while mimicking clouds, stones, hillsides or trees. Within beautiful landscapes he explores the vision of the camera’s eye and the boundaries of the human body. While Minkkinen’s images have been compared to his contemporaries Dieter Appelt and John Coplans who are also white male artists creating self-portraits of their naked bodies, Minkkinen’s contortions that imitate natural elements are more akin to Laura Aguilar’s Nature Self Portrait series. Where Appelt’s and Coplans’ distorted and disturbed forms communicate a struggle or examination of the faults and fissures of the masculine body, Aguilar and Minkkinen find a sense of belonging that resonates with the natural elements as something inherent, essential and beautiful. Through this process of self-representation, they grow in self-acceptance.

In her series Master Rituals: Weston’s Nudes, Krajnak addresses the history of The Nude in Modernism by one of the ‘masters’ of the photographic canon Edward Weston. Krajnak reenacts Weston’s images as both homage and critique by taking the poses of the models Bertha Wardell and Charis Wilson from his book Nudes published in 1977. In the act of performing both roles in front of her camera, Krajnak asserts her identity by including her face and showing the cable release that establishes her as both subject and artist. The images she made in her studio during the pandemic quarantine have a DIY aesthetic that references their timely creation. The cinder blocks, large stone and plywood that she uses as a backdrop combine with the 1-by board that she employs to hold open the book to the page she is recreating and lend a formalist element and a sense of humor to the images that take a critical look at the The Nude in photography and challenge the authority of the white male gaze.


Black Serenity by Granville Carroll prompts the viewer to question what they see by creating a visual space from which the body emerges and into which the body recedes. Unlike Minkkinen’s images where we see him in poses that we could never replicate in our own body, Carroll utilizes familiar gestures that we might all participate in on a daily basis like, praying, dancing and running. His body is fluid in motion within this void of blackness. The void is as Buddhist practitioner Stephen Bachelor describes, not of emptiness but a state of emptying oneself of negative or damaging beliefs, thought patterns or in this case stereotypes. Carroll forms this void as a space of possibility, exploration and metaphor for the Black male body. The depiction of Blackness that Carroll traverses in his images is at once sensual, vulnerable and moving beyond racial boundaries.