William Coupon is a portrait photographer who moved from New York City to  Santa Fe in 2016.

Coupon's first photographs were photographs that talked – called "audiographs" – which were photographs that had looped cassettes behind a framed image, and photographs that moved – called "kinetographs" – which were photographs that were attached to moving motors. The "kinetographs" were commissioned for window displays at Bloomingdale’s in the late 1970s. He photographed a documentary on Studio 54, the legendary New York disco, in the late summer of 1978, which was immediately included in the International Center of Photography exhibition: "Fleeting Gestures: Treasures of Dance Photography."
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Coupon became interested in formal studio portraits in 1979 while observing its lower Manhattan youth and its present counter-culture, and decided early on to use a single-light source and simple mottled backdrop and when necessary, he would set this up as a highly mobile portable studio. The same backdrop was then used to document global sub-cultures. Many of the projects – referred to as "Social Studies" – became documents of indigenous people, Haitians, Australian Aboriginals, Native Americans, Scandinavian Laplanders, Israeli Druzim, Moroccan Berbers, Alaskan Yupik, Spanish Gypsies, Turkish Kurds, Central African Pygmy, and Panamanian Cuna and Chocoe.

These projects also included Death Row Inmates, Drag Queens, and Cowboys. Stylistically, they were always photographed formally on the backdrop, and contextually, or environmentally, with 2 1/4 Rolleiflex black and white images, which were meant to be companions to the studio portraits.

Please click on an image for more information and to purchase. ​

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