PhotoAlliance: Gary Schneider December 2, 2005

$8 General Admission

Gary Schneider was born in South Africa in 1954, moved to New York in 1977, and currently teaches at Cooper Union in New York City.

For nearly three decades, his innovative photographic work has questioned our understanding of individuality by probing the nature of portraiture and the subjective quality of perception. From his attraction to biology and science have come a series of collaborative visual experiments which "transform their specific subject matter and probe the enigmatic character of identity."

Schneider's time-extended portraits of family and friends utilized a light source so small that a single exposure required several hours. That made it impossible for the subjects to strike an intentional pose or for him to control the photographic results.

Schneider's works are held in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the International Center of Photography, the George Eastman House, the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, and the Museum of Fine Art in Boston.

His work has been exhibited internationally. Recently, the Sackler Museum at Harvard University mounted a survey exhibition accompanied by an exhibition catalog co-published by Harvard and Yale University Press, which also incorporated work from the exhibition, Genetic Self-Portrait: An Artistic Response to the Human Genome Project.