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Gary Schneider is best known as the subject of his own photography. The fifty-four year old South African photographer’s most famous work is entitled "Genetic Self-Portrait," a dramatic series of photographs that draws on the inside and outside of the artist's own body for its subject matter. In another work, Schneider used long-exposure photography to explore the human body inch by inch with a small hand held flashlight. Beneath the harsh and unforgiving lens, Schneider unflinchingly invokes his own homosexuality, the history of South Africa and the crisis wrought by the AIDS virus.

Schneider’s bold self-expository work was never just an intense self-reflection in film. In 1970s South Africa, the open sexuality and homo-eroticism in his portraiture drew openly hostile reactions and skirted the boundaries of the Apartheid state’s repressive laws.

"The Portraiture of the Flesh," a retrospective exhibit at the Museum of Photographic Arts at Balboa Park, gathers together numerous works of Schneider's including parts of the "Genetic Self-Portrait" and a series of close-up photos entitled "John in Sixteen Parts," and photo series which use the latest microscope technology to portray hair follicles, blood cells and chromosomes.

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