Hard Copy New York by Aaron Stern at ICP

Following previous iterations, including a 2025 show in Los Angeles, the group exhibition uses the visual language of the copy machine to evoke nostalgia for a time of more deliberate picture making.

Overview

The International Center of Photography presents HARD COPY NEW YORK, an expanded iteration of Aaron Stern’s ongoing project exploring the contemporary use of the photocopied image. Following previous iterations, including a 2025 show in Los Angeles, the group exhibition uses the visual language of the copy machine to evoke nostalgia for a time of more deliberate picture making.  

In our current moment when digital images proliferate, fewer physical copies of images are made or exhibited. Through this show, curators David Campany and Aaron Stern aim to reassert photography's inherent power: its ability to offer a profound, democratic, and tangible experience. 

Exhibited artists include Daniel Arnold, David Black, John Divola, Zoë Ghertner, Takashi Homma, Jerry Hsu, Shaniqwa Jarvis, Ari Marcopoulos, Ryan McGinley, Asako Narahashi, Collier Schorr, Stephen Shore, Gray Sorrenti, Thomas Ruff, and Andre D. Wagner.

Photocopy technology was invented in 1938 and its commercialization followed in 1949 as a way of making fast and cheap reproductions of documents. Soon after, artists and designers began to experiment with its distinctive grainy feel and informal aesthetic, using it as a way to explore the concept of reproduction while expanding their means for doing so as well.

While no imaging process is ever truly obsolete, photocopying was eclipsed by new methods of digital scanning and storage. Despite these innovations, the allure of the photocopy aesthetic has remained because of its unique qualities—we all recognize the particular ‘look’ of a photocopy, with its associations of cheapness, speed and ubiquity, along with its particular evocations of beauty or ugliness. Though it retains its own historical sensibility, the photocopy still symbolizes reproduction and mutation, effects we all experience in a world of what now seems like near infinite image proliferation.

Following previous iterations, including a 2025 show at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles, the exhibition features a unique process of collaboration between the participating artists and cocurator Aaron Stern, who photocopies the original images contributed by each artist. These images are then scanned and, if necessary, enlarged. Moving between intimate and epic scales with subjects ranging from the diaristic to the photojournalistic, via landscapes, portraits and still life, HARD COPY NEW YORK revitalizes a collective engagement with analog technologies and methods of image production. From a 51 foot long autobiographical mural by Gray Sorrenti (b. 2000), to a recreation of images by Stephen Shore (b. 1947) of Andy Warhol’s Factory that were first presented in a deliberately low-quality exhibition catalogue in 1968, the exhibition situates photocopying within the present while alluding to its history, one that is rich but still largely unwritten.

“Bridging high culture and low, the refined and the raw, HARD COPY NEW YORK shows how photography’s creative potential often lies in its most unexpected and mutable forms,” said David Campany, co-curator and Creative Director at ICP.

About Aaron Stern 

Aaron Stern is a Manhattan-based curator, artist and author working between the Americas and Europe. His photographs, books, writing and curatorial projects have appeared in publications and institutions such as RoseGallery, Webber Gallery, WSA, Magenta Plains, Dashwood Books, Perrotin, Photo Saint Germain, International Center for Photography, Paris Photo, Los Angeles Art Book Fair, Index Art Fair, Purple Magazine, The Paris Review, Vogue, The New York Times, Dazed&Confused, and Interview Magazine.