The Brooklyn Rail

Photocopies are stapled, taped, and nailed to the walls at the International Center of Photography. At the same time that New York’s leading photo-focused museum is exhibiting luminous Parisian scenes by the legendary Eugène Atget, and the richly detailed color photographs of Nuits Balnéaires and François-Xavier Gbré, it presents HARD COPY NEW YORK, a sprawling multi-floor group show of prints produced using a Xerox machine. Aaron Stern, the artist and curator who organized the exhibition with ICP’s Creative Director David Campany, invited fifteen contemporary photographers to enter into a collaborative process of “reinterpreting” their work—photocopying, scanning, and enlarging it, in some cases to be as big as a billboard. The show is a continuation of Stern’s work with office equipment, which first took significant form as a photobook, OK, No Response (Twin Palms Publishers, 2021), and has since materialized in several iterations of the HARD COPY exhibition between New York and Los Angeles. Stern began working on OK, No Response shortly after the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, when he and the artist Lucy Helton maintained a connection by exchanging images via fax. They eventually engaged eighteen others in their lo-fi conversation, sharing photographs throughout a period when nobody could convene in person. In this context, the outdated mode of printmaking gained a newfound usefulness; the fax allowed for contactless visual dialogue, spitting out grainy black-and-white prints whose aesthetic reflected the collective nostalgia for simpler times. So, when I learned that an adaptation of Stern’s photocopy project would be mounted as an exhibition at ICP this year, I wondered why—if not merely because it’s inexpensive, looks cool, and feels somewhat irreverent to do so at a major museum. What is uniquely possible when printmaking with the copy machine? Without the circumstantial impetus that drove OK, No Response, the exhibition is made to address this question anew.

The most considered contribution comes from Daniel Arnold, a street and fashion photographer who the New York Times once dubbed “the William Eggleston of Instagram” for his vividly colorful snapshots of pedestrian chaos. The photocopier saps his pictures of their characteristic chromaticity, but his wall collage of photographs still bursts with raw humanity—alternatively intimate, confrontational, foolish and angelic, and always a bit rabid. At center hangs Rue l‘Epic (2014), a massive horizontal image, composed of nine sheets abutted in a three-by-three grid, showing a backlit woman hurrying away from the cameraman, barefoot, stilettos in-hand, mid-stride and hovering an inch above the sidewalk; the contrast of the photocopy is so pronounced that she and her shadow make an imperfect Rorschach double. Emanating from both sides of the scene like fragments of a just-shattered glass, smaller photographs depict New York City life in portraits and snapshots that are claustrophobically stapled to the wall. Images are ripped, rearranged, and repeatedly printed with varying tonalities, thus revealing different details in each copy. The bust of a subway rider is twice copied, one more shadowy than the other, giving nuance to the man’s expression in each print. A similar discrepancy distinguishes two copies of another subway shot, so that only the lighter one reveals text scrawled on the wall like a thought-bubble above a seated passenger, asking, “What have you seen?”

Arnold is one of the few artists in HARD COPY NEW YORK who takes full advantage of what the photocopy has to offer as a medium. The majority of the other works on view are single images, cleanly hung on the wall or laid on a display table so as to foreground their formal properties. The printmaking process is at once generative and degenerative, eliding details and negating color while imbuing each photo with residual graphic data, like prominent grain and bands running vertically and laterally. In certain underwhelming instances, it appears as though Stern has applied an Instagram filter to the work of his collaborators, reducing their quality without any poetic return on investment. But the best of the standalone pictures are made enigmatic by the Xerox machine, especially in those cases when the prints effect synergistic relationships between the image and the added noise. A prime example of this is Ryan McGinley’s Falling (Light Leak) (2013), featuring an isolated nude form freefalling into a haze of light, as if the body is being reclaimed by the photocopy’s static. The static also lends a cinematic patina to the closely cropped portraits and oceanic stills of Zoë Ghertner (2021–23), the Japanese volcanoes repeatedly imaged by Takashi Homma (2018) and Asako Narahashi (2003), the erogenous shots of tongue-kissers and stockinged legs of Thomas Ruff’s Nudes (1999–2012), and the silhouetted stallions from David Black’s “Candy Mountain” series (2021), overlapping like paper cutouts as they race across open expanses of the American West.

Perhaps Stern and Campany felt the many disparate subject matters at play in HARD COPY NEW YORK were sufficiently integrated by the printing process, but the show can feel scatterbrained at times. If there is a prevalent theme, it is the host city itself, represented in Arnold’s work as well as that of Ari Marcopoulos, Stephen Shore, Gray Sorrenti, and Andre D. Wagner, which altogether amounts to roughly half of what’s on the walls. With this in mind, it seems to me a missed opportunity to not have organized the whole exhibition around such an inexhaustible and interpretable subject as New York—dazzling as the aforementioned volcanoes and kisses and horses may be.

There is great variety even within the New York subset, starting with the unlikely intergenerational dialogue between Shore and Sorrenti, each of whom picture the coolest of the cool of their respective youths in the city, half a century apart. Shore’s early photographs (1965–67) show the deified denizens of Andy Warhol’s Factory, such as Lou Reed and Edie Sedgwick, along with Warhol himself, alternatively posing and painting. Sorrenti, a Gen-Z fashion photographer, presents CallMeILoveYou Excerpt, #002 (2025), a 51-foot-long autobiographical mural pieced together of hundreds of screenshots taken during FaceTime calls with friends and loved ones. A suite of six ominously mundane photographs by Wagner, titled Gates Ave., 2nd floor (2015–20), look down onto the city street from the elevated perspective of a security camera, so that the prints of nondescript interactions register as stills from fuzzy footage just before or after some dramatic event. Then there are the portraits and graffitied streetscapes of Marcopoulos, an artist who has long worked with the Xerox (in an interview with Aperture, Stern credits his photobooks as an inspiration). As the only artist who produced his own copies, Marcopoulos brings the DIY sensibility of his zines to the exhibition setting. His several image-text pieces convey streams of consciousness on topics like addiction and immigrating to New York, densely handwritten in an imperfect, meandering scrawl on his photographs. While much of the work in HARD COPY NEW YORK seems anxious to justify its presence at ICP—impressively printed and judiciously hung, with the blue-chip aura of a Wolfgang Tillmans’s show—it's refreshing to see artists like Marcopoulos and Arnold embrace the hard copy for what it is. To hell with justification—just let it rip.