Vito Acconci

What constitutes a self-portrait? These conceptual examples by Ann Hamilton, Vito Acconci, and Sol LeWitt put pressure on this category. Hamilton used her mouth as a pinhole camera, capturing this image by using light that entered through her open lips. The four stills by Acconci are from a video performance where he plucked out all the hair around his naval as an exploration of the masculine body. There is no body present in LeWitt’s aerial photograph of Manhattan, but it delineates four spaces where he lived. Taken together, these works each highlight ways that photography becomes an active tool to understand the self.

–Conor Moynihan, assistant curator of prints, drawings, and photographs