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Art in Chicago - September 1996
Dominic Molon, Curator, MCA © 1995.
The stark representation of daringly posed, muscular male
nudes against a white background has become the signature
style of photographer Joe Ziolkowski. Exhibitions of his
work are often accompanied by controversy, because of his
frank depiction of homoerotic themes. Joe Ziolkowski was
born in 1960 in Jacksonville, Florida, and received his BA
in photography in 1980 from Southern Illinois University,
Carbondale. In 1980, while studying at SIU, he began
photographing the nude male figure. Ziolkowski moved to
Chicago in 1983 and received his MFA in photography from
SAIC in 1987. His photographs are informed simultaneously by
Greek sculptural ideas of perfection in the male body, the
crisp photography of predecessors such as Minor White and
Edward Weston, and the persistent threat of the AIDS virus
in the gay community and the world at large.
In 1988 two of Ziolkowski's images were featured in a
SAIC alumni exhibition at 200 North LaSalle Street, curated
by Joe Cavalier and Tony Tasset. The exhibition could be
seen from both the street and the lobby, prompting
complaints from tenants regarding his work Beyond Boundaries
#3, in which two male nudes embrace. During an ensuing
controversy, a compromise was reached between Ziolkowski,
the curators, and the building's management, resulting in
the covering of the photograph with paper, with the note
"covered from the public view by the request of the
management" placed beside it. Ziolkowski's concurrent
exhibition at N.A.M.E., "A year in the Life of Joe Z.,"
which documented his daily routine, proceeded without
incident.
Ziolkowski moved to New York in 1990. Conflict followed
him to his 1991 exhibition at Lycoming College in
Williamsport, Pennsylvania, where a number of people
expressed their displeasure with the exhibition. The
exhibition featured Ziolkowski's "The Numbered" series, a
numerically titled series of portraits of male and female
nudes shown hanging upside down from torso to head. Begun in
1988, the series metaphorically represents the anxiety
experienced by those awaiting the results of HIV tests. In
1992 Ziolkowski completed "The Pressure" series, consisting
of images of nude males taken from beneath a pane of glass,
demonstrating Ziolkowski's desire to experiment with the
physicality and malleability of the body. He returned to
Chicago in 1994 and created "The Silence," a series that
marks a further departure from his earlier photos in the use
of a studio environment and props, with the ubiquitous male
nudes testifying to the silence maintained within our
society on various levels and subjects.
Ziolkowski has published a book of his photographs titled
Walking the Line (1992). A successful freelance
photographer, he served as MCA staff photographer from
1987-1989, and rejoined the staff in 1995. He currently
teaches at SAIC at the American Academy of Art in Chicago.
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