A Third Look – Joseph Maida

When legendary curator, John Szarkowski, first presented Lee Friedlander’s nudes in a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1991, he wrote that “the qualities of generosity and openness, and the habit of continual exploration—of logical extemporization enlivened by an unassuming audacity” make Friedlander’s nudes so “richly and rewardingly complex.”

Maida, viewing the traits of openness, exploration, extemporization, and audacity as queerness itself, reimagines Friedlander’s nudes by picturing different bodies in A Third Look. Maida’s calls their feminist reclamation of history “a visual queering of modernist photography, providing a visible reconciliation of where the canon of art photography has historically allowed us to see with the broader spectrum of the human nude.