Author Description

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 realised 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 --