Joe Mama-Nitzberg Loves His Memes

Gabi Vidal-Irizarry explores the art of distortion and the limits of photographic truth in a group show at Luhring Augustine.

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settle for a good fantasy, a photography show at Luhring Augustine is about portraiture, more or less. Through patchwork, collage, cropping, zooming, and a blurring of registers and tones, artists Janice Guy, Shaun Pierson, David Seidner, and Joe Mama-Nitzberg strip away markers that might otherwise anchor an image to a specific person, place, or moment. What’s left is room for whimsy and fun. In the late ’70s, Janice Guy photographed herself over and over again, almost compulsively. The result is Untitled (1977), 35 black-and-white self-portraits pinned unframed in rows of seven. She appears chin up, chin down, head turned left, then right, her blunt black bob and bangs falling differently each time. Together, the frames recall Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, digital test shots, and also, weirdly, Beyoncé’s “Countdown” music video. The subtle choreography from shot to shot feels prescient, a precursor to the micro-movements anyone now makes hunting for their best angle in a selfie.

In Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes searched for what he called “the air,” the quality that makes a picture true to its subject. A portrait invites the viewer to imagine a life behind a face, filling in the gaps with assumptions, projections, or empathy.  Guy multiplies that invitation 35 times over, until the effect begins to reverse itself. The subject, who happens to be the artist herself, becomes less knowable with each image, until she’s almost specimen-like, anonymous, and inscrutable.

Guy serves face, so much of it that it becomes dizzying. Elsewhere, Shaun Pierson serves body. In Untitled (Head), Untitled (Torso), Untitled (Pits), the crop he uses almost causes a mutilation: the face is cut away, the body broken into disparate parts. “Sometimes the face is too specific,” he tells me. Tattoos are too idiosyncratic as well. “I don’t want anything that’s too specific to the person that’s being photographed. I want them to be somewhat malleable.” Pierson scouts his models online, and the pictures reflect back the performed intimacy of the digital rendezvous. Think a Sniffies map of faceless torsos. “I’m interested in the photo shoot as a sort of reflection of an anonymous sexual encounter, where it’s really intimate for a brief period of time, but it’s fleeting and almost transactional in a way,” he told me. Eye contact is ordinary, staring at a stranger’s chest for that long is not.

His pairs have never met before the shoot, and he never photographs anyone twice. “I like it to be a little awkward,” he said. In Untitled (Cherries), two men sit side by side on a rumpled sheet, backs to the camera, both in white Hanes briefs, a few cherries scattered beside them. It could be the morning after, the awkwardness on full display. It could also be a momentary spat between longtime partners, or the apprehension of two recent hookups who have just seen each other naked for the first time. Untitled (Straddle), in which one body sits astride another, is less ambiguous; an erotic nod to the photographer straddling his model in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up.

David Seidner, who died of AIDS-related illnesses in 1999, took the polished perfection of fashion photography and broke it apart. In YSL/Cynthia Antonio (mosaic), a model in a rose-print Saint Laurent gown appears in shards, her body reassembled like a broken mirror. It evokes the hall of mirrors where Rita Hayworth’s reflections splinter at the end of Orson Welles’ The Lady from Shanghai.

Meanwhile, Joe Mama-Nitzberg’s works were born out of lockdown. Scrolling online, he kept coming across posts about histories he had lived through, the AIDS crisis being one of them. “We all live in this ahistorical, atemporal, decontextualized algorithm,” he said. Central to the work is the challenge of representation: how to memorialize a tragedy in an attention economy that prizes speed, where a quick glance can create the illusion of understanding. Mama-Nitzberg loves memes. One of his favorites, “Woman Yelling at a Cat,” pairs a crying, pointing Taylor Armstrong from The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills with a baffled white cat at a dinner table. For Mama-Nitzberg, it’s “an art school exercise: how does a caption change the image?” He applies the same logic to images that predate the internet—magazine ads, record sleeves, and theater posters. He calls his approach, “Granny makes me a meme.”

Take Peter, Sam, and Scott, a fake magazine ad for “the important one,” a nonexistent single by “Sam and Scott,” a fictional musical duo made up of OpenAI’s Sam Altman and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. The single’s cover features Geoffrey, the tender gay outcast from the 1961 film A Taste of Honey, tinted pale blue like an old Smiths sleeve. On the album, the duo is played by Leopold and Loeb, two wealthy young Chicagoans and rumored lovers who murdered a 14-year-old boy in 1924, believing themselves to be Nietzschean supermen capable of committing the perfect crime. The rave review, “Record of the year,” comes from Palantir’s Peter Thiel. His humor first seduces, then perverts. The ad calls to mind an invitation that circulated online for “a private, off-the-record al fresco dinner” in Amagansett, hosted by Gwyneth Paltrow in Altman’s honor. The internet was quick to suspect it was AI generated. It turned out to be real.

In Say Hello…Wave Goodbye, Mama-Nitzberg turns his attention to lives cut short. The work takes found photographs of Ryan White, the Indiana teenager with hemophilia who was barred from school after his AIDS diagnosis; Pedro Zamora, an openly HIV-positive cast member of MTV’s The Real World who died of AIDS-related complications at 22; and Matthew Shepard, the gay college student murdered in Wyoming in an anti-gay hate crime. He ages them with FaceApp, imagining the futures they never got to have. Styled like an old movie poster, the piece bills the three as its stars. Below them, in the supporting-cast slot, are the names of six of Mama-Nitzberg’s friends who died of AIDS with no pictures at all. He calls the work “a self-portrait, a portrait of those named, a portrait of loss, a portrait of a certain time, and a portrait of time in general.”

Fakery, Mama-Nitzberg knows, can be “horrible” or “magical.” It depends whose hands it’s in. “That’s what fantasies and stories are, right?” he asks. “That’s what we get transported by.”

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