In 2011, on a trip to South Africa for an exhibition, Gary Schneider began a series of handprint portraits of South African artists. Having grown up in South Africa, which he left in 1977 at the age of twenty-three, Schneider realized that this would not be an overview of South African art but rather a way to reconnect with a country that still has an enormous influence on his work. On several subsequent trips, he travelled widely to make handprint portraits in Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth, Grahamstown and Durban. Included in the book are seventy-seven handprint portraits. Each imprint is a record as singular and individual as a fingerprint but, at the same time, free of all the usual markers of physical identity.
Gary Schneider was born in 1954 in East London, South Africa. His work was the subject of a major exhibition that opened at Harvard University’s Fogg Museum in February 2004, and incorporates his previously acclaimed solo exhibition, Genetic Self-Portrait, an artistic response to the Human Genome Project. He has shown extensively worldwide, including Museé d’Elysee, Lausanne, Switzerland; Museum of Fine Art, Houston, Texas; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Illinois. He is represented by Julie Saul, New York; Stephen Daiter, Chicago; and Howard Yezerski Gallery, Boston.