John Coplans (24 June 1920, London – 21 August 2003, New York) was a British-American artist, photographer, writer and curator who lived and worked in New York from 1971 onwards. Before fully dedicating himself to his own artistic practice, he worked as an art critic, museum director, and as one of the founding editors of the influential magazine Artforum. Around the age of sixty, photography became the central medium of his artistic practice.
Coplans became best known for his monumental black-and-white photographs of his own naked, ageing body. Deliberately excluding his face, he photographed his body in fragments, transforming hands, feet, his back, stomach and limbs into almost autonomous forms. Through their close cropping and scale, his photographs continually shift between the recognisable body, landscape and abstraction. His uncompromising focus on ageing and physicality challenged conventional ideas of beauty, youth, masculinity and the idealised body. With these radical self-portraits, Coplans created an oeuvre that occupies a distinctive place within post-war photography and conceptual art.