Bathers

The series known as Bathers coincided with Duncan’s emergence as a mature, exhibiting photographer. The images that he made in a variety of beach settings—mostly in Southern California, but also in Hawaii—beginning in the mid-1970s increasingly received critical attention, an interest that has continued to distinguish this body of work well into the twenty-first century. Writing about this series in 1981, David Wing noted the narrative strength of the artist and the delicate balance he achieved between formalism and storytelling:

McCosker’s appetite for movement, gesture, and evolving symbol is large, and in order to reveal the special nature of his bathers, he places them into the most flexible formal envelope. Affection is at the center of each of these photographs, an affection which is clearly master over the order of the image. McCosker encourages each figure, working to sustain its independent nature against the formal demands of the medium. . . These photographs are magical.

By the late 1990s, the artist shifted his focus away from the beach- goers in La Jolla and took on a variety of new projects, a number of which are also shown in this exhibition. Bathers, however, remains one of his most popular series. Many of the museum curators who have admired Duncan’s work have selected images from this series for their institution’s permanent collections.