Aneta Bartos' series Family Portrait at Masculinities: Liberation through Photography

Exploding with psychosexual drama and tension, Polish-born, New York-based artist Aneta Bartos’s performative series Family Portrait, 2015–18, alludes to the way portraiture is often a process of artifice and construction. What began as the intention to document her father, a retired bodybuilder, before his body started ageing, quickly turned into a collaborative project: Bartos brings herself into the frame to usher in a disquieting and challenging variant on the father–daughter dynamic, one seemingly untethered from societal expectations. In Apple for instance, Bartos’s father holds an apple while Bartos stares directly to the camera and by extension at the viewer, calling into question the biblical narrative of the fall of man.

What does it mean to be a man today? The Barbican's Masculinities: Liberation through Photography considers how masculinity has been coded, performed, and socially constructed from the 1960s to the present day.