When in Rome

In his new show in New York, Todd Gray brings together a vast array of global locations and subjects for a series of dazzling photo-collages—opulent Italian architecture, a historic slave-trading post in Senegal, and up close and personal with Michael Jackson, Bobby Brown, and Iggy Pop. These juxtapositions nudge fantastical narrative suggestions into the imagination, as they put, say, a mesmerizingly backlit Jackson mid-concert in 1981 alongside a saint floating in golden mosaics at Saint Mark’s Basilica in Venice, as in Glitter ’n Gold, 2 (St. Marks), 2024.

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Somehow all the images in “While Angels Gaze,” on view at Lehmann Maupin through March, do converge in one way, each with a place along Gray’s own timeline, traversing his professional arc from music-industry photographer to fine artist and all his globe-spanning travels. The artist was raised Catholic—that is until, he tells me, his early teens, when he’d noticed his monsignor driving a Lincoln Continental and questioned his parents about the clergyman’s apparent conspicuous consumption. Appreciating their son’s critical thinking, they released him from attending service going forward.

When he headed to Italy in February 2023 for a year-long fellowship as the winner of the Rome Prize, Gray didn’t have a specific plan of action. “I stumbled around and photographed what caught my eye and relied on intuition,” he says. He was also acutely aware of the history of the Roman Empire as what he calls “the culture that originated colonization”—and with it, the deep-seated, power-hungry entitlement to lord over others, evidently inherited by the Roman Catholic Church. “The church made it permissible and morally acceptable to carry on with the Atlantic slave trade,” Gray notes. “That’s part of the groundwork of this series.”

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In Gray’s composite of Gorée Island, Villa Torlonia, 2024, a larger image, which serves as the base, portrays a plush sofa at Villa Torlonia, a 19th-century villa custom-built for a banker that was later rented by Mussolini. (“Mussolini sat on that couch!” Gray declared at his opening.) Painted on the wall behind the couch are trompe l'oeil arches that open into a blue expanse. On top of the luxe Villa Torlonia scene is a second image in an oval frame that reveals an interior glimpse of a former slave fortress at Gorée Island in Senegal, with two arched doorways and an arched window looking out onto the ocean, serene yet foreboding. 

“As an architectural feature, archways are present in the church, and they are also present in the slave fortresses in West Africa,” says Gray. “One archway leads redemption—another archway leads Hell,” he adds with a laugh, elaborating that he was compelled by the vastly differing contexts of similarly ubiquitous architectural features, like columns.

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While Gray came into his own alongside the Pictures Generation, and was a pupil of John Baldessari’s at CalArts, the artist insists on using only his own photos for his collages: “If I’m going to appropriate anything, I’m going to appropriate myself,” Gray says. (Technically, “While Angels Gaze” contains two exceptions, with photographs of the stars taken through NASA’s Hubble telescope—though Gray, fairly enough, reasons that he produced the images with his tax dollars.)  Notably, the style of collage he’s been showing since 2014 is not the slapdash scissors-and-glue sort; each photo-as-layer receives its own sleek frame and meticulous placement, something like a testament to its special-ness.

So, where did the close-up snaps of the musical legends come from? Gray got his start in the music industry by bringing cameras to concerts as a Los Angeles teenager in the 1970s, and he went on to shoot upwards of 100 album covers for the likes of Barry White, the Temptations, and the Doors. Then, after completing his undergraduate degree at CalArts in 1979, he was hand-picked by Jackson to work as his personal photographer throughout much of the 1980s. He was also briefly housemates with Iggy Pop and the Stooges.

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Given the culture of celebrity-worship he witnessed firsthand, Gray quickly drew sharp parallels with the awe-striking visuals so infamously associated with Catholicism (and which he’d first grown wary of as a teen). “The church would use colors and architectural features that the commoner would not come across so that when they‘d come inside the church, they were awed,” he says. “There’d be a similar experience of awe when you go into a concert and see all the techniques of stagecraft that are used to awe an audience.”

Speaking to Glitter ’n Gold, 2 (St. Marks), Gray reflects on the “glittery top” donned by Jackson, “I saw this relationship when I looked at that image of the dome with the gold inlay and how it glitters. And I thought, Oh wow, that’s a technique—how the church used it, and how performers used it.” Elsewhere, a raw, sinewy shirtless Iggy Pop, captured on stage at Sunset Boulevard’s iconic Whisky a Go Go, lines up near perfectly on top of a nude Roman statue in Villa Torlonia, as seen in The Song Remains (assumptions about the nature of time), 2024. In Other tellings (Hollywood, Florence, Cosmos), 2024, Al Green and a hulking, classical nude in a ceiling fresco at the Pitti Palace in Florence appear to extend a hand toward the other. 

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Brown, arms raised in what appears to be a state of rapture, can be spotted in Other Tellings (myth is the threshold of history, everything both exists and is imagined), 2024. His likeness is superimposed on top of another fresco from Villa Torlonia, this one depicting a reclining Black female figure, chained in place, donning a beaded necklace. In a different photograph to the left is a silhouette of an unnamed business woman, wearing a similar necklace, who Gray photographed for Black Enterprise Magazine in the 1990s—a decidedly modern contrast to the chained figure. 

A more straightforward message came out of an accidental technological glitch, in which some of Gray’s photo files were corrupted due to a faulty SD card. One was of a classical Roman-style bust at the Huntington Library in Los Angeles that, thanks to the damage, appears to be dissolving into vertical streaks of neon purple, orange, and pink. Creating a work titled future/past, again #2, 2024, Gray paired the digitally decayed picture with one showing the ruins of Tempio di Marte Ultore in Rome, with the remains of its walls and columns mirroring the strange verticality of the digital distortions. “I just thought, Oh, what a wonderful dialogue that would make: the past, then this Technicolor present that we have, and how technology is supposed to save us from ourselves,” says Gray. 

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The artist’s insights into past versus present, and all of the ways that the bygone eras still live on, might raise questions about why, exactly, we preserve what we do. Because then there’s everything Gray has decided to preserve through his archives—superstar musicians, and now photographs of architectural creations that date back hundreds or thousands of years. And Gray has found that the echoes across everything are infinite. It’s a revelation that’s perhaps simple to observe in piecemeal, yet absolutely breathtaking to fully take in.

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“While Angels Gaze” is on view through March 22, 2025, at Lehmann Maupin at 510 West 24th Street, New York, New York, 10011.