New York City famously champions individuality, entrepreneurship, and grit. Especially when it comes to artistic and self-expression. And it generously offers a playground to do so. The walls, the subways, the avenues, the architecture—arguably all canvases to express these qualities. But what do individuality and authorship mean in a city like New York, when hundreds and thousands of people are also creating, recreating, and expressing themselves in these ways?
Photography has long complicated this relationship between individuality and repetition. Images circulate, evolve, and return in new forms. Reprinted, reposted, or reframed.
In our current moment when digital images proliferate, fewer physical copies of images are made or exhibited. Through HARD COPY, an exhibition exploring the contemporary use of the photocopied image, curators David Campany and Aaron Stern aim to reassert photography's inherent power: its ability to offer a profound, democratic, and tangible experience. Each photocopy is an interpretation of the original art pieces—one that calls into question process, ownership, and the commercialization of art.
HARD COPY, an ongoing project for Stern, has lived in several contexts, including exhibitions at WSA in New York, in 2024 and at Webber Gallery Los Angeles in 2025. It also exists in zine form. Stern’s approach to curating the first show in 2024 was less “planning an exhibition” and more collaborating with friends—all celebrated artists with their own careers.
For HARD COPY’s latest iteration at ICP, the project grew, bringing together a group of 15 artists whose visual styles traverse abstraction, documentary, fashion, and conceptual photography. It taps into the repertoire of talent such as Takashi Homma, Daniel Arnold, Collier Schorr, Ryan McGinley, Stephen Shore, and Gray Sorrenti, among others. It’s the first time this show—and Stern’s curation—are being seen in this context of a museum exhibition.
This also meant curating for ICP’s space, which Stern remarks added gravity and a sense of permanence, even if the show is temporary. Documentary photographer Daniel Arnold, who started his career alongside Stern, argues there’s something that binds the group together in a big photographic conversation in which they all participate.
“The show represents unexpected corners of worlds intersecting. We all keep each other in mind and feel like community in one way or another. And if you think of people in our little social media echo chambers, there’s a decent joke to be made about us covering the walls of a museum in photocopies. It can be argued that’s what we’re doing anyway, without the walls. Just copying each other and finding new spins, xeroxing them and crumpling them up. In this city, the desire for individuality is rubbed in your face. While at the same time you discover that everything you do ends up being a copy of something or it ends up being copied.”
Arnold’s remark also gestures toward a broader shift in how images circulate today. Museums were once the primary sites where audiences encountered photographs. Now images often appear first on social media feeds at such a rapid rate, making them more inaccessible than before. HARD COPY makes that circulation visible in the most tactile way, translating the rhythms of reposting and remixing into a physical form.
It comments on ideas of originality, inspiration, and self-critique–foregrounding a reality where viewers interpret and digest these works in a more demystified and tangible manner. Standing in stark contrast to exhibitions designed with the camera phone in mind.
Curatorially, photocopying gave Stern the license to show work that feels more physical, immediate, and open to imperfection. One example is Gray Sorrenti’s intentional FaceTime Portraits, taken over 10 years (and photocopied), which cover an entire wall of the exhibition. Through this process, a seemingly everyday perspective is resurrected through a different treatment, context and curation.
Credit: Jenna Bascom
Stern said, “I like that it allows for mistakes. I can print it super-large for very little money comparatively. It's a little off register It breaks down hierarchies between genres, emerging and established artists, and between what is maybe seen as important and what just hits you.”
This license is exercised quite literally by Arnold in an installation of works taken on his first iPhone in 2012-13, which kicked off the artist’s career. He was new to New York and created raw street moments to preserve that feeling of the first look—like a monument to civilization.
In the show, Arnold “reclaims” these photos, now seen as xeroxed black-and-white, crumpled images which stand in stark contrast to their color, high-quality printed cousins published in his monograph You Are What You Do. Arnold added, “To infest them with the disease of my early work feels kind of like reclaiming them. The spirit stayed the same, but the presentation changed so much, and now, I’m sending them back to where they came from.”
Seen from Essex Street, Arnold’s installation is an ode to the streets of New York. It also blurs the boundary between exhibition and public circulation—another reminder that images rarely stay confined to a single space today.
Credit: Jenna Bascom Photography
Photocopying may seem like an outdated technology in the age of digital reproduction. Yet its imperfections (grain, contrast shifts, the occasional misalignment) chronicle the physical life of images. In this sense, HARD COPY reminds viewers that every act of reproduction carries both loss and transformation.
Stern told Surface Mag, “ICP made legacy possible. It’s New York. My hometown. The most important art city. In my opinion. I hope this iteration feels more expansive and precise. Maybe in previous versions I had to explain the use of the photocopy printing method for a show. I don’t feel that way this time around.”
In a city built on reinvention, originality rarely exists in isolation. Images are borrowed, reframed, and repeated. Sometimes deliberately, sometimes unconsciously. HARD COPY embraces that reality. By turning reproduction itself into a curatorial method, the exhibition suggests that copying is not the opposite of creativity, but one of its conditions.
All Image Credits: Jenna Bascom
