A Third Look

In A Third Look, Joseph Maida reflects on Lee Friedlander’s nudes from the 1970’s and 80’s, reinterpreting this series as a cutting edge homage both to Friedlander, the modernist titan of photography, and to LGBTQIA+ bodies across gender and identity spectra. 

Foreword by Zackary Drucker, The (Un)Certainty of Seeing

audacity as queerness itself 

When curator John Szarkowski first presented 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, reimagined Friedlander’s nudes by picturing different bodies in A Third Look to converse with Friedlander’s.  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.

Charlotte Cotton

"A Third Look is a remarkable book that distills Joseph Maida’s deep and considerate creative journey and investigation of our human form. Maida invites us into a photographic world that is both highly relatable and radical - to a space where we can be conscious of our primary capacity to see and understand from beautifully non-conformist and non-binary vantage points. A Third Look asks us to take another look at photographic desire and our interpretation of naked human forms - to celebrate where we can situate ourselves and the visual heritage that we can claim as our own."

EVA RESPINI

"Against the backdrop of photography’s long, often fraught, history in the genre of nudes, Joseph Maida creates unforgettable pictures of those less-visualized, so long known, but long unseen. Through his tender, incisive photographs, Maida also investigates his own masculinity and position of power to picture others, making an essential book for our times."

Hanya Yanagihara

"Joseph Maida brings a sense of curiosity, respect, and tenderness to all his projects and subjects. This latest series, a loving and provocative inquiry into what makes us human, and how we shape our sense of selves, is no different."