That the nude belongs to such a great and enduring tradition poses problems. How to refresh so traditional a tradition? How to keep new the most venerable of genres? Those questions are especially vexing for photographers, who tread water atop an image glut of oceanic scale. All rivers run to the sea, and all magazines, video, digital imagery, and much more besides inundate the collective visual unconscious.
It's this tension between tradition and innovation, the longstanding and the novel, that informs ''The Body Familiar: Current Perspectives of the Nude," which runs at the Griffin Museum of Photography through March 19. Comprising 66 images, it presents nine photographers offering nine very different ways of looking at the human form.
A glaring falsehood sustains the nude as a genre: that the human body is commonly beautiful. That there are beautiful human bodies is certainly the case, as Hollywood and Madison Avenue ceaselessly remind us to their great profit. Alas, a quick look in a full-length mirror will usually bear out that those bodies are glorious exception rather than humdrum rule.
John Coplans's photography confronts that falsehood, imposingly, forthrightly, and, of course, not at all attractively. Coplans, who died in 2003, spent two decades photographing his aged, naked body in minute, oversize detail: a monumentalizing, if not celebration, of wrinkles, sags, and general decay.
Coplans's three large-format triptychs are worlds away from Charles Cohen's 24 images, many snapshot size. He has taken pornographic images from the Web and then, in a sense, desexed them. The naked woman who invariably is at the center of each becomes a white cutout. These denuded nudes look like two-dimensional George Segal sculptures -- an amusing enough conceit, but not much more. Robert Flynt, by contrast, superimposes rather than removes, placing his own images over found images. The muffled, gauzy results don't so much allude to Pictorialism as wanly ape it.
