Anthony Goicolea

The Late 1990s — Digital Compositing Meets Performed Photography

Goicolea was born in Atlanta as a first-generation Cuban American. Recent interviews and artist profiles describe his upbringing in the American South amid the Cuban refugee crisis, the AIDS crisis, and the rise of the religious right, and note the social stigma he experienced through being Cuban, gay, and Catholic^*21. His awareness of social categories and identities that shift within politics provides a concrete background for the groups of boys, uniforms, conformity, and exclusion in his early photographs.

After moving to New York in the 1990s, Goicolea studied photography, sculpture, and film and began, toward the end of the decade, to composite multiple self-portraits into single images. By 2001, the International Center of Photography was presenting these early works as scenes in which boys on the threshold of adolescence enact fantasy, ritual, and social taboo^*22. At a moment when large-scale staged photography and digital editing were gaining prominence in contemporary art, Goicolea concentrated those tools on the question of whom the self can perform.

Large-scale staged photography and digital editing were becoming increasingly common in contemporary art during this period. Goicolea chose to keep a surface that resembled an actual scene from school life instead of drawing attention to the composite through overtly cybernetic effects. The Museum of Contemporary Photography’s 2002 exhibition clearly described the structure at an early stage: the adult artist transforms himself into adolescent boys through makeup, wigs, and costume, then performs multiple roles within the photograph^*1.

Photographing Queer Adolescence as an “In-Between State”

Uniforms, dormitories, games, competition, eating, violence, and sexual tension recur throughout Goicolea’s early work. He has said that he is especially drawn to “in-between states,” moments in which things are undergoing transformation^*9. As the Museum of Contemporary Photography described the adult artist’s return to boyhood through makeup, wigs, and clothing as “adolescence in reverse”^*1, the role of the boy functions as a mask for repeatedly performing a transitional state before body, desire, and belonging settle into fixed terms.

In Musée Magazine, Goicolea discusses his interest in chaos, loss, displacement, and change and says that Cindy Sherman was a natural reference during his period of self-portraiture^*8. Building on the precedent of a single body assuming different guises, Goicolea places several roles within one frame and makes identical bodies perform social relations with one another.

Making a Crowd from One Body — What Digital Compositing Does

Repeating the same self many times within one image serves more than a technical effect. Goicolea himself connects his interest in identity to being socially positioned through several categories—Cuban, gay, and Catholic^*21. Self-duplication allows the same person to occupy positions of conformity, deviation, aggression, and desire at the same time. Digital compositing makes those divergent roles coexist within one convincing social space.

This structure lets friendship and exclusion, domination and submission, and desiring and desired positions be performed simultaneously within the same body. In a statement published by Lenscratch, Goicolea likewise describes casting himself in multiple roles within staged self-portraits to create artificial and isolated worlds^*12. Digital duplication turns contradictory roles within the self into relationships among figures who appear to exist at the same moment.

Seamless Realism Brings the Multiplied Self Close

Goicolea’s early photographs conceal the joins of the composite and first establish the realism of a school photograph or film still. In Musée Magazine, he emphasizes integrating visual manipulation into the image’s aesthetics and ideas instead of letting the manipulation draw attention to itself^*8. The viewer can therefore accept the scene as a school photograph or film still before noticing the repeated face.

ASU Art Museum also identifies the digital multiplication of Goicolea’s own body as the mechanism that produces group scenes of boys^*13. The stronger the photographic realism, the more psychologically immediate the impossible relationships become. Once the scene has been accepted as plausible, the repeated face is discovered and the initial realism turns into unease.

The “Boy” as Mask — Layering Age, Desire, and Power onto One Body

The Museum of Contemporary Photography describes the artist, then around thirty, performing adolescent boys through makeup and costume as an enactment of developmental transformation in reverse^*1. Institutional settings such as uniforms, dormitories, and dining halls function as visual codes for age and belonging. Inserting an adult male body as a boy and then multiplying it into a group makes boyhood and the norms of male peer groups appear as roles repeatedly performed through clothing, posture, hierarchy, and desire.

Telfair Museums’ Alter-Ego exhibition page reproduces Morning Sleep (2004) and describes the early work as enigmatic, humorous, and unsettling scenes constructed through costume, wigs, makeup, and digital compositing^*2. Queer desire emerges through the arrangement of who looks at whom and which positions the same body occupies.

Morning After — Constructing the “After” Through Self-Duplication

The Whitney Museum’s Morning After is a representative example of the early large-scale color photographs in a museum collection^*3. Across these works, bodies, food, disorder, and exhaustion suggest events before and after the pictured moment. Cause and consequence remain outside the frame for the viewer to imagine.

Telfair Museums’ retrospective Alter-Ego organized roughly a decade of work to show the movement from early images of adolescence and ritual toward later concerns with solitude, displacement, aging, and environmental unease^*2. Seen across the retrospective, the multiplied boys lead into sustained concerns with isolation, movement, aging, and environment.

From Photography to Drawing and Film — What Remains After the Multiplied Self

Ron Mandos describes Goicolea’s work across photography, film, drawing, and sculpture through memory, identity, and family history^*10. After multiplying the self in his early digital photographs, the work expands toward faceless figures, forests and houses, and family memory. Across changing media, the question of who was there is distributed through several forms and layers of memory.

In Anonymous Self-Portraits, white painted forms cover the face, bringing gesture and clothing forward over facial recognition. Ron Mandos explains that hiding the face shifts the cues through which identity is read from expression toward posture and body language^*11. From the early repetition of the same face to later works that cover the face, Goicolea continually unsettles the identification expected of portraiture.

Related — Building Family History from Photographs, Memory, and Narrative

In Related, the multiplicity once located within the same face expands into family time. The official biography identifies his family’s departure from Cuba in 1961 as part of the background to the work^*7, and KADIST reads Related 3a through family history, migration, and memory^*4. By building a past he did not personally experience from family photographs, resemblances, and narrated memory, Goicolea extends the earlier problem of a self that cannot be contained in one identifying image into questions of generation and migration.

KADIST likewise presents his work across several media through themes of family, migration, history, and inheritance^*5. The later work on his official site makes clear that the recurring concern is the decomposition and reconstruction of the memories and social roles that form the self across several media^*6.

Early Reception — Seduction and Unease in the Same Image

The Library of Congress catalogue describes Goicolea’s photographs as large-scale staged images concerned with adolescence, identity, and desire, and records how the monograph organized key early images^*15. In the early 2000s, attention centered both on the technical finish of the digital manipulation and on the sexual and violent ambiguity of the boy figures.

Hyperallergic’s review of Alter-Ego traces a growing sense of apocalypse and solitude across photography, film, painting, and installation^*14. This reading shows how treating the early crowds of duplicated selves as digital spectacle alone would obscure their continuity with the later work.

Photographing a Queer Self Through Exchangeable Roles

More Art describes a body of work, including public projects, concerned with migration, family, queer identity, and memory^*16. In Goicolea’s photographs, the structure in which one person performs an entire group also contributes to the queer self-image. Positions of viewer and viewed, dominant and dominated, exchange places within the same body.

Aurel Scheibler similarly presents the digitally manipulated self-portraits, landscapes, films, and drawings as one multimedia body of work^*17. The early use of Photoshop matters because it creates power relations and exchanges of desire among duplicated bodies. Staged photography becomes a psychological and social space in which several selves can occupy one image simultaneously.

Turning the Self-Portrait into a Group Portrait in 2000s Staged Photography

From the late 1990s into the 2000s, large-scale color staging and digital editing helped turn photography into a space for constructed scenarios. Goicolea’s early work is distinctive within this development because every figure returns to the artist himself, producing an invented “society” from one body. ICP’s 2001 description of the work as self-duplication performing the threshold of adolescence, fantasy, ritual, and social taboo shows^*22, that digital manipulation was received early on as a structure for examining identity and group norms.

As Goicolea’s attraction to “in-between states” suggests, the work repeatedly focuses on identities in the process of changing^*9. He multiplies the same face, turns it into a boy, and later conceals it. Across those operations, the self-portrait becomes a form for asking how many roles can make a person at once.

From Early Self-Duplication to Sheltered Life

The Brooklyn Museum’s Ice Storm belongs to the 2005 Sheltered Life series and marks a development from duplicated groups of boys toward allegorical scenes in which the environment itself overwhelms the figure^*18.

The U.S. Department of State’s Art in Embassies profile likewise describes the group scenes of boys as large-scale self-portraits in which one artist performs every figure through costume, wigs, makeup, and Photoshop^*19.

A contemporary Artforum review discusses Detention (2001–02) as a series of digitally arranged clones of the artist in uniform, showing that the mechanism of one person performing a group was already central to the work’s early reception^*20.