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History of Photography
Introduction
History of Photography
A World History of Photography
The Story Behind the Pictures 1827-1991
Photographers' Dictionary


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THE STORY BEHIND THE PICTURES 1827-1991
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1 Nicephore Niepce. View from the Study Window, 1827
2 Louis-Jacques-Mande Daguerre. Boulevard du Temple, 1838
3 Eugene Durieu/Eugene Delacroix. Nude from Behind, ca. 1853
4 Duchenne de Boulogne. Contractions musculaires, 1856
5 Auguste Rosalie Bisson. The Ascent of Mont Blanc, 1862
6 Nadar. Sarah Bernhardt, ca. 1864
7 Francois Aubert. Emperor Maximilian's Shirt, 1867
8 Andre Adolphe Eugene Disderi. Dead Communards, 1871
9 Maurice Guibert. Toulouse-Lautrec in His Studio, ca. 1894
10 Max Priester/Willy Wilcke. Bismarck on his Deathbed, 1898
11 Heinrich Zille. The Wood Gatherers, 1898
12 Alfred Stieglitz. The Steerage, 1907
13 Lewis Hine. Girl Worker in a Carolina Cotton Mill, 1908
14 August Sander. Young Farmers, 1914
15 Paul Strand. Blind Woman, 1916
16 Man Ray. Noire et blanche, 1926
17 Andre Kertesz. Meudon, 1928
18 Robert Capa. Spanish Loyalist, 1936
19 Dorothea Lange. Migrant Mother,
Nipomo, California, 1936
20 Horst P. Horst. Mainbocher Corset, 1939
21 Henri Cartier-Bresson. Germany, 1945
22 Richard Petersen. View from the Dresden City Hall Tower, 1945
23 Robert Doisneau. The Kiss in Front of City Hall, 1950
24 Dennis Stock. James Dean on Times Square, 1955
25 Bert Stern. Marilyn's Last Sitting, 1962
26 Gerard Malanga. Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground, 1966
27 Helmut Newton. They're Coming!,
1981
28 Sandy Skoglund. Revenge of the Goldfish, 1981
29 Robert Mapplethorpe. Lisa Lyon, 1982
30 Joel-Peter Witkin. Un Santo Oscuro, 1987
31 Sebastiao Salgado. Kuwait, 1991
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see also:
Mapplethorpe Robert
Chapter 28 (part I)
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1982
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Mapplethorpe Robert
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Lisa Lyon
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Portrait of a Lady
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The most-talked-about
photographer of the 1980s, Robert Mapplethorpe was a belated classicist
who understood how to present provocative themes in catchy visual images.
After his photographic work with the New York leather scene, male nudes,
and erotically-charged flower studies, Mapplethorpe turned his lens on the
first female world champion in body-building. The resulting cycle is
probably his most comprehensive work, and at the same time constitutes an
homage to the new, strong woman, who is aware of her body.
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The name of the woman is Lyon.
Lady Lisa Lyon. The alliteration is no accident. The same holds for the
reference - at least phonetically - to the king of the beasts, for this,
too, is part of a broader strategy. The young woman has a sense for
effective publicity gestures. Furthermore, the physical strength of a wild
animal - natural, untamed, and by no means the sole province of the male
sex - has in any case always been her ideal. And it has aided her in
defending women's body building when she has had to it in the face of a
generally skeptical public. As she admits in ig8i in her best-selling
Lisa Lyon's Body-Building, she feels like an animal. For her, physical
signs of strength, charm, and suppleness do not have to be limited to a
single sex. This association only exists in people's limited conception of
things.
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lady Lisa Lyon
1982
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Formerly a rather uptight
individual
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Lisa Lyon is admittedly not the
first woman to take pleasure in strikingly well-developed biceps. In her
book, she reminisces about the Viennese strong-woman Caterina Baumann, one
of the greatest athletes in history, who was able to lift ten times her
own weight in the 1920s. But it was Lisa Lyon who brought the discipline
out of the ghetto of the circus, removed it from its historical niche in
bourgeois reform movements, and declared it to be a matter of course in
the life of the 'new woman'. Her timing was unquestionably right. The
Utopian ideals of the 1960s were now history; the 1970s were nearing their
end, and values were once again undergoing a turnover. It was a good
moment to introduce a fresh concept: that of a new, physically conscious,
and above all physically powerful woman, and to integrate this ideal into
the developing consciousness of the 1980s. In this sense, Lisa Lyon is
unmistakably a child of the Reagan era, even if at first glance her entry,
armed with dumbbells, seems not precisely to coincide with the
ultraconservative spirit of the times. But in the struggle for wealth and
success, in the glorification of power and the fetishism of material
happiness (it's no accident that Dallas and Denver Clan are ruling the
air-waves at this time), there was a meeting of the minds. As part of her
fitness program, Lisa Lyon recommends zero tolerance towards what she
designates as losers. As cynical as it may sound, the advice corresponded
fairly well to the political climate of the day. Lisa Lyon is dressed in
mourning. But that doesn't signify anything - except that the creator of
the picture, Robert Mapplethorpe, had been raised a Catholic and
throughout his life retained an affinity with everything smacking of
Catholicism. Robert Mapplethorpe is also obsessed with sex - a combination
which may appear to be a self-contradiction, but on the other hand,
explains his approach to his own homosexuality: an unusually long road
marked by repression and denial. To claim that precisely the artist who
had made homosexuality the theme of his photography at the end of the
1970s had once been a rather uptight individual is therefore not far from
the truth. But Mapplethorpe, who had so many problems with his own
coming-out, discovered in photography a medium for self-exploration - and
applied it excessively. The cold smoothness of his emphatically
formalistic photography, so well-schooled in principles of design, has
made it easy to overlook this exploratory aspect of his work. His pictures
give the impression of being finished pieces, at least at first glance.
But they are just the opposite. His work abounds in contradictions - along
with a good shot of irony - all of which indicate that his creations are
in fact children of Postmodernism. Lisa Lyon, 1982. What do we see here? A
young woman, perhaps in her early twenties. One could call it a profile
portrait - to be more exact, a half-length portrait - but with this
difference: the side-view is rather unusual within the genre of portrait
photography. A traditional professional photographer would invariably
choose the more flattering half- or quarter-profile, all the while giving
the subject precise instructions on the direction in which to turn their
gaze - above all, course, to look past the camera. But our young woman is
standing or sitting with an admirably erect posture, looking straight
ahead. One is almost reminded of the pho-tographs of criminals
systematically taken by the French photographer Alphonse Bertillon around
1890: his strategy for identification rested on only two exposures, one of
which was precisely this 'hard' profile. The dark veil with its suggestion
of sorrow, however, provides an ironic com-ment on this association. What
we can make out under the veil is correspondingly little. For example,
that the subject has carefully painted lips, and seems to be waiting
without expression for whatever might come her way. That she is looking
straight ahead, we have already noted - but is this really true? Hasn't
she in fact closed her eyes? The veil obscures her gaze and, together with
the elegant hat decorated with artificial flowers, stands in clear
contradiction to the erotic appeal of the gleaming black bustier. The
picture, one might say, splits into a 'serious' upper half and a less
'serious' lower half. It is the combination of the two that gives the
scene its fascination. In addition, what the observer will certainly
notice first and then give more attention to: the steely upper arm with
its large number of unretouched moles - certainly a contradiction to the
ideal of the self-confidently presented, beautifully formed body? Or can
it be that these 'impurities' not only belong to the iconography of the
image, but also to the ideology of a new ideal of beauty?
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lady Lisa Lyon
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Someone from a different planet
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Cover and double-page spreads from
Lady Lisa Lyon: the original edition of the book was published Tg8j by The
Viking Press, New York
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Depending on the version one
follows, they met for the first time in 1979 or 1980 at a party in Soho.
Lyon was wearing a leather jacket and black rubber pants, an outfit that
Mapplethorpe, with his unwavering interest in bizarre eroticism, could not
help but notice. "Mapplethorpe," according to his biographer Patricia
Morrisroe, invited her to Bond Street the following afternoon for a photo
session, and she appeared at his door in a miniskirt, thigh-high leather
boots, and a wide-brimmed hat decorated with feathers. He immediately
responded to what was then an exotic notion - a muscle-packed woman - by
photographing her in the frilly hat, flexing her biceps. Never before, as
Morrisroe relates, had he seen such a woman: "It was like looking at
someone from another planet." Robert Mapplethorpe was thirty years old at
the time - not yet a star, but well on his way to becoming the most
internationally known photographer of the 1980s. Born in Queens, New York,
in 1946, he had, so to speak, photographed his way out of his petty
bourgeois background and over the rim of the New York subculture, all the
way to the top - an amazing trajectory that is only partially explained by
the active support of his influential friend Sam Wagstaff. With his simple
but elegant, classically oriented interpretation of the "unspeakable",
Mapplethorpe had touched the nerve of the age - an era in which the
emancipation of homosexuals had already advanced considerably, without the
increased gay self-confidence having yet developed an appropriate
aesthetic of its own. Precisely herein lies the importance, and moreover
the achievement, of Robert Mapplethorpe. Certainly, there had been
photographers with homosexual interests earlier; one needs only to recall
Fred Holland Day, Thomas Eakins, or George Platt Lynes. Or the
illustrations of Tom of Finland might be considered here. But what these
artists had created under cover, or at best in the context of the
subculture, Robert Mapplethorpe made palatable, consumable, for wider
circles, and thus moved the theme into the mainstream of art. But the
protection provided by the success of his work fostered more that a
broader recognition of gay eroticism. The move in the understanding of
photography in the 1980s from merely a technical picture-producing medium
to an art form with a place in the museums is very largely thanks to
Robert Mapplethorpe. The only other artist to achieve such a strong and
international reception was Mapplethorpe's original model, Andy Warhol.
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon with snake
1982
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An androgynous manifestation
with unkempt hair and a man's shirt
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To the same extent that
Mapplethorpe defined a new image of the male, who was now allowed to be
black and horny, strong and beautiful, physically conscious of his body,
sexy, and capable of taking pleasure in him-self, he also participated in
the transformation of the contemporary image of woman. The artist's
black-and-white portraits of the Rock poet Patti Smith, whom Mappelthorpe
had lived with for an extended period at the beginning of his artistic
career, provide an example. Smith's pale, elf-like being flew in the face
of all standard ideals of beauty, extending from Veruschka to Raquel
Welch. Mapplethorpe took numerous photographs of Smith, the most famous
probably being an androgynous manifestation with unkempt hair, a white
man's shirt, and tie. The record company is said to have repeatedly
refused to use the photograph on the cover of Patti Smith's first record,
Horses. Years later, when the music magazine Rolling Stone made a list of
the 100 best covers of all time, Horses was number twenty-six on the list.
Mapplethorpe's liaison with Patti
Smith had already come to an end when he met Lisa Lyon in 1979/80. For the
photographer it was, so to speak, like the continuance of a fascination by
other means. Where Patti Smith clearly represented the ideals of the 60s
generation in her life and art, Lisa Lyon was an unmistakable product of
the 1980s: ambitious, success-oriented, goal-directed and, last but not
least, clever in a very pragmatic way. While still at university, the
five-foot-three young woman - not precisely tall - had become acquainted
with kendo, the traditional Japanese martial art. She enjoyed discovering
what her body could do, testing it to its very limits, and eventually
joined Cold's Gym in Los Angeles, the center of body-building in the USA -
initially, in must be said, with the opposition of her male environment.
Hormonal differences, so it was then assumed, would prevent a woman from
developing her muscles. Furthermore, Lyon faced doubts about her
perseverance. But inspired by her great example Arnold Schwarzenegger, and
guided by well-known bodybuilders like Franco Colombo or Robbie Robinson,
she threw herself into training, "rigorously counting bicep curls and leg
lifts" (Morrisroe). In the evening, she trained at home in her apartment -
taking, instead of steroids, LSD in order to "reprogram her cellular
structure". !n 1979, in the virtual absence of competition, Lisa Lyon won
the first world championship in women's body-building; the following year,
she did not even bother to enter. From this perspective, she had a short
but effective career. Even before the sport had been properly born, Caine
and Butler claim in their 'bible' of heavy athletics, Lisa Lyon was not
only the leading protagonist for female body-building, but also its media
star, making numerous appearances on television and radio, and presciently
extolling the virtues of (strong) girl-power.
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa Lyon
1981
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Homage to the erotic force of
the human body
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For Robert Mapplethorpe, Lisa Lyon
offered a welcome opportunity to at least balance out his image as a gay
or sadomasochistic photographer. He took the first pictures in his loft at
24 Bond Street, with others to follow in an unnamed fitness studio and
outdoors under the Californian sun. It is probably fitting that the Lisa
Lyon cycle is considered the most comprehensive of all Mapplethorpe's
works. Just how many exposures were made between 1980 and 1982 we do not
know; in any case, 117 black-and-white, largely square, pictures found
their way into the first volume of Lady Lisa Lyon, published in 1983. Some
of the images are obviously drawn from the fashion photography of Horst P.
Horst, others refer to the Art Deco pictorial language of Hoyningen-Huene.
Borrowings are also recognizable from Weston's dune nudes as well as the
early photography of the nudity movement. Mapplethorpe likes to quote. In
return, his pictorial style had an influence on photodesign and on the
advertising of the 1980s. Contemporary art criticism, however, looks at
his work rather critically. Ulf Erdmann Ziegler speaks of "technoid pomp,"
A. D. Coleman of "warmed-over pictorialism." However it may be,
Mapplethorpe's work remains an expression of its time. In retrospect, his
pictorial homage to the erotic force of the human/male body seems almost
like a futile protest against the latter-day plague that in the end also
claimed his life. Robert Mapplethorpe died of AIDS early in 1989. By then,
Lisa Lyon had already long since fallen back into anonymity. Their meeting
was short, but powerful - and not without results for our understanding of
the being and appearance of the modern woman.
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Lisa Lyon
is a female bodybuilder from the United States. Her stats as taken on
October 1980: She stands at 5'3" and weighs only 105 pounds, but she can
dead-lift 225 pounds, bench-press 120 pounds, and squat 265 pounds; two
and a half times her own weight.
Born in Los Angeles, California in 1953, Lisa Lyon is regarded as one of
female bodybuilding's pioneers. She studied art at the University of
California at Los Angeles, and became accomplished in kendo, the Japanese
art of fencing. She began weight training to build more upper body
strength for kendo. Lyon entered and won the first IFBB Women’s World Pro
Bodybuilding Championship in Los Angeles on June 16, 1979. This was the
only bodybuilding competition of her career. Nevertheless, she became a
media sensation, appearing in many magazines and on television talk shows.
She also wrote a book on weight training for women titled Lisa Lyon’s Body
Magic (ISBN 0-553-01296-7), which was published in 1981.
Lyon became the first female bodybuilder to appear in Playboy in October,
1980. She was inducted into the IFBB Hall of Fame in 2000.
Lyon played Cimmaron in Vamp, a low-budget 1986 film starring Grace Jones.
Lyon modeled for American fine art photographer Robert Mapplethorpe,
resulting in the 1983 book Lady: Lisa Lyon (ISBN 0-312-05290-1).
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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa
Lyon
1980-1982 |

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Robert Mapplethorpe
Lisa
with Scorpion
1981-1983
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Robert
Mapplethorpe
(b New York, 4 Nov 1946; d Boston, 9 March 1989).
American photographer, sculptor and collagist. In the early 1970s, after
studying at the Pratt Institute of Art in Brooklyn (1963–70), he produced a
number of assemblages and collages from magazine photographs often altered
by spray painting. In one such work, Julius of California (1971;
Charles Cowles priv. col.), he drew a circle around the male figure’s
genitals as a subversion of the usual practice of censorship. He soon began
to take his own black-and-white photographs with a Polaroid camera,
incorporating them into collages (e.g. Self-portrait, 1971; Charles
Cowles priv. col.,) or arranging them in sequences, as in Patti Smith
(Don’t Touch here) (1973; artist’s col.), a portrait of the poet and
singer who was one of his favourite models. Within a year of showing his
Polaroids in his first one-man show (New York, Light Gal., 1973) he began to
use a large format press camera, followed soon afterwards by a Hasselblad.
As his interest in photography increased, so he looked more closely for
guidance to such earlier photographers as Nadar, Julia Margaret Cameron and
F. Holland Day. His photographs of the later 1970s include a number of
homo-erotic, sado-masochistic images, such as Helmut (1978). Here, as
in other works, the presentation of a carefully posed figure against a plain
paper or cloth backdrop creates a strong formal structure in counterpoint to
the shock value and intensity of the subject-matter. This formal emphasis is
even more apparent in the flower and still-life works, such as Pan Head
and Flower (1976; Holly Solomon priv. col.).
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Self-Portrait
1980 |
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Self-Portrait, 1988
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Joe
1978
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Brian
Ridley and Lyle Heeter
1979
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Self-Portrait
1986
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Lindsay Key, 1985
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Calla Lily, 1986
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Ajitto
1981
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Apollo
1988
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Derrick Cross
1982
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Charles
1985
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Ken Moody
1983
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Leatherman II
1970
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Patti Smith
(Horses)
1975
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Orchid and Leaf
in White Vase
1982
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Calla Lily
1984
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Tim Scott
1980
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Keith Haring
1984
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Waves
1980
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Roses
1986
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Self Portrait
1983
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Calla lily
1986
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Flower arrangement
1980
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Desmond
1983
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Thomas
1986
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Mum
1989
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Orchids
1980
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Selfportrait
1981
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Gun Blast
1985
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Ed Ruscha
1984
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Patti Smith
1978
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Cindy Sherman
1983
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Lily
1979
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Patti Smith
1987
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Alice Neel
1984
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Andy Warhol
1986
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Leon Golub
1986
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Francesco Clemente
1982
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Ron Simms
1980
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George Bussey
1986
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Ken Moody
1984
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William Burroughs
1980
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Sam Wagstaff
1979
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Lucinda Childs
1977
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Louise Nevelson
1986
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Self Portrait
1980
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Self Portrait
1985
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