William Coupon (born December 3, 1952, in New York City) is an American photographer, known principally for his formal painterly backdrop portraits of tribal people, politicians and celebrities.
He began in 1979 to photograph backdrop portraits of New York’s youth culture, to document its “New Wave/Punk” scene at the then popular Mudd Club in lower Manhattan.
He continued to photograph portraits, often of various sub-cultures and indigenous peoples in the 1980s and early 1990s including Haitians, Florida State Prison inmates, Australian Aboriginals, Drag Queens, Alaska Natives, Scandinavian Laplanders, Turkish Kurds, Israeli Druze, the traditional Dutch, Moroccan Berbers, New Guinea tribesmen, Brazilian Caraja, Malaysian Penan, Native Americans, and the Mexican Lacandon, Huichol, Mennonite and Tarahumara.
The portraits have a quality about them that is less about fashion than about personality and as groups there is attempt to show their disparity as well what is relatable among the earth's faces in a manner that is real, non-compromising, or over-glamorized.
Coupon was featured in the Visual Collaborative Polaris catalog, under the Supernova series for humanities, he was interviewed alongside people such as; Nse Ikpe-Etim, Xárene Eskandar and Nere Teriba.