Reality Testing not represent firsthand experiences, but are related

to the perhaps more socially important manufactured

experiences which are being created daily by the
Robert Slifkin
mass media.”1 In one sense Heinecken’s technique
undermines the highly mediated imagery by literally
doubling its tactics, allowing viewers to look through
Robert Heinecken’s lithograph Are You Rea #1 (1964–68, rather than look at it.2 His use of everyday source
plate 171) asks a crucial question that has occupied many material invests his works with a directness that shares
artists, and in particular those working with photography, certain characteristics associated with Pop art, which
since the 1960s: what constitutes reality in a culture that was frequently described by its earliest critics in the
seems increasingly technologically mediated, increasingly 1960s as a form of “new realism,” but it also points
commercialized, and increasingly suspicious of established to the crucial, frequently problematic relationship
verities—in short, in a culture that seems increasingly between photography as an artistic practice and its
unreal? The text, deliberately truncated, that appears commercial applications.3 Because photography
in the image may be understood to question either the superseded hand-drawn illustration as the primary
realness of the figures it accompanies or their readiness means of representation in advertisements in the late
(in fact the advertisement from which it is taken asks, 1950s, artists using photography were in many regards
“Are You Ready?”). Heinecken’s inventive photogram better situated than painters and sculptors to perceive
technique, in which a sheet of black-and-white the complex dynamics informing mass media imagery
photographic paper is exposed to a page from a popular and in turn to engage with both its form and content.4
magazine set upon a light box, so that both sides of the In the mid-nineteenth century, soon after photography
page register simultaneously on the final print, makes was invented, a conception of modern art emerged that
explicit the duplicity—the literal two-sidedness—of positioned itself as a sophisticated foil for its demotic
the source material. Although the manifest object of such other, oΩering a beneficial dose of authenticity and
reality testing appears to be a woman taking oΩ her shirt criticality that seemed unavailable with more popular
to reveal her brassiere, when she is seen in conjunction formats.5 Yet photography, a medium that since its
with the page’s exposed verso imagery—a domestic inception has been used for a variety of nonaesthetic
interior with wooden blinds and an Eero Saarinen–style purposes (from family portraits to scientific illustration
chair, the hourglass shape of which echoes the strap and to commercial illustration), has had a more complicated
cup of the bra’s right side—the uncertainty of the title and complex relation to mass culture. Because of its
shifts to refer, perhaps, to the magazine layout itself. essential-seeming association with technological
The uncanny correspondences between the two sides reproduction, photography has played an instrumental,
include a woman on the verso who is shown at a smaller even foundational role in the expansion and dissemination
scale but with a similar haircut, and the intersection of mass media, in fact existing and even thriving in
of an almost perfect triangle rising from the navel of the various mass media outlets well before it was generally
larger figure with a smaller triangle of a rug in the domestic accepted as a fine art. Many of its most accomplished
shot; these echoes amplify a feeling of skepticism about practitioners, such as Edward Steichen, Walker Evans,
the reality depicted in the pages of the magazine and and Henri Cartier-Bresson, moved e≈ciently between
suggest a sinister complicity among the makers of commercial and aesthetic realms while managing to
images—and the images themselves—in the world keep the two distinct.6 In 1927 the Bauhaus luminary
of commercial mass culture. László Moholy-Nagy noted that photography’s essential
Are you real? This is an understandable question relationship to technological innovation made it ideally
to pose of what Heinecken described as the “printed suited to the rhetoric of novelty that drives the world
promotional material” that was the primary subject of marketing, declaring, “Photography in advertising
of his project. The ensuing pictures, he wrote, “do is not an alien conception.”7 Irving Penn wittily

1 and the Arts (Chicago: University second half of the 1950s and its role 6

Robert Heinecken, preface of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 3–28. in Andy Warhol’s career, see Thomas See for example, Patricia Johnston, Real
to the portfolio Are You Rea, Crow, The Long March of Pop (New Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising
(Los Angeles, 1968). Are You Rea #1 3 Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Photography (Berkeley: University of
serves as the introductory plate One of the first exhibitions to feature 2014), pp. 174–84. California Press, 1999); David Campany,
to the portfolio of twenty-five prints. Pop art was The New Realists, which Walker Evans: The Magazine Work
took place at the Sidney Janis Gallery 5 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2014);
2 in autumn 1962. The definitive study of this dynamic is and Peter Galassi, “For the Printed Page:
On “looking through” versus “looking Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” Cartier-Bresson’s Work in the Periodical
at” in twentieth-century cultural 4 in Modern Art and the Common Press,” in Henri Cartier-Bresson: The
production, see Richard A. Lanham, The On the increasing role of photography Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Modern Century (New York: The Museum
Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, in commercial advertising in the University Press, 1996), pp. 3–37. of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 328–53.

192
 acknowledged this productive confusion in an elegant less antagonistic relationship with mass culture than the
still life of frozen food—a thoroughly modern commodity one proposed by Friedlander. The televised photograph
that slyly parodies photography’s capacity to “freeze” has been rematerialized, from light rays back into
its subjects (1977, plate 195). In this anti–still life, the an object, into what we might call a remedial image,
artist subtly elaborated on the message of vanitas and whose unintelligible haziness elucidates the limits
memento mori by using color photography, a format of representational veracity. Such acts of remediation
that until the 1970s was generally eschewed by many may allow artists to invest mass media imagery with
fine art photographers because of its impermanence critical insight, and high artistic practice with the
and the instability of its tonal registrations, as well immediacy and power of low cultural imagery (such
as its longstanding association with advertising. as advertising) while still setting itself apart from it.9
A diΩerent sort of freezing of mass-cultural artifacts In their representation and incorporation of other
takes place in Lee Friedlander’s Aloha, Washington forms of mass media, both Aloha, Washington and
(1967, plate 173), in which the photographer has captured the Perpetual Photograph works can be understood
a televised image of President Lyndon B. Johnson to demonstrate what the artist JeΩ Wall has described
beneath a collection of family portraits and mass- as the “rethinking and ‘refunctioning’ of reportage”10
produced commodities such as a clock, an antenna that has characterized art photography since the 1960s.
(ornamentally bordered by a doily and kitschy Here, the idiom of objective documentation is applied
angels), and the television set itself. Evans, drawing to the realm of art and, more generally, to the dynamics
on modernism’s longstanding antipathy toward low of representation rather than to real events and people
culture, celebrated Friedlander’s television portraits as in the world. If earlier photographers typically pursued
“spanking little poems of hate” revealing the “unearthly their subject with a “hunter’s consciousness,” as
pall” that the “reflected light from home television boxes Friedlander put it, patiently staking out their subjects
casts over the quotidian objects and accouterments and waiting for Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive
we all live with.”8 This merciless description figures moment to capture their picture, in these two works
television as the vulgar inverse of photography, the photographers had to be equally vigilant, keeping
indiscriminately casting light outward from the screen watch over their television screens so as not to miss
of the receiver rather than purposefully capturing an evocative conjunction in the televised image
it within the lens of the camera. Friedlander’s adroit or between it and its domestic setting.11 Thus they
composition of preexisting imagery asserts the camera’s aligned the readiness of the camera operator with the
capacity to encompass a wide spectrum of objects and, evanescent—and uncertain—realness of the mediated
unlike the emitted light of the television, to organize subject on the screen.
them through the selective gaze of the photographer. The tradition of the decisive moment was transformed
Created more than twenty years later, Allan by artists who produced images not by pursuing the
McCollum’s Perpetual Photograph works (1985, plate 189) dynamic flux of external reality but by searching through
expand on this transcendence of (and dissolution into) the standardized and historically diverse archive of
mass culture, paradoxically transforming the moving mass-cultural images. Although the act of selection has
scan lines of the television screen into static—and thus always been a crucial element of photography, through
perpetual—abstractions. To make them, McCollum the perimeter of the viewfinder and in darkroom
photographed scenes in television programs that practices such as cropping, in the 1970s artists
featured photographs in the background, and he then increasingly made the very act of selection, not in the
enlarged that section of the background (the original viewfinder but in the world itself, the central subject
full photographs are attached to the backs of the works). of their work, so that the encounter between the artist
The results, with their implied correspondence between and the mass-produced image, as well as its subsequent
the particulate grain of the photographic print and the representation, were as decisive as the dynamic instant
pixelated surface of the television monitor, suggest a captured by the photographer in the street. Sarah

7 8 9 10

László Maholy-Nagy, “Photography Evans, “The Little Screens: On remediation, see J. Bartor Jeff Wall, “‘Marks of Indifference’:
in Advertising,” in Christopher Phillips, A Photographic Essay by Lee and Richard Grusin, Remediation: Aspects of Photography in, or as,
ed., Photography in the Modern Era: Friedlander with a Comment Understanding New Media (Cambridge, Conceptual Art,” in Jeff Wall: Selected
European Documents and Critical by Walker Evans,” Harpers Bazaar, Mass.: MIT Press, 1998). Essays and Interviews (New York:
Writings, 1913–1940 (New York: February 1963, pp. 126–29. The Museum of Modern Art, 2007),
The Metropolitan Museum of Art, p. 144.
1989), p. 86.
11

Ibid., p. 146.

Photography and/as Mass Media 193

Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History, June 21, repetition of cultural stereotypes isolated from their
1979 (1979, plate 185) catalogues the media coverage intended contexts exposes their utter conventionality
of a murder. The journalist Bill Stewart was killed by a and thus undermines their tenacious rhetoric of
Nicaraguan soldier on June 20, 1979, and the next day naturalness. Serial techniques are thus a compelling
Charlesworth tracked the event in twenty-seven diΩerent means of examining the representational codes of a
newspapers, revealing the event’s circuitous route mass culture whose very ubiquity makes such codes at
from newsreel film to televised video to photographic once ideologically eΩective and generally undetectable.
reproduction. Charlesworth opted to display the Like Prince, other artists have presented actors and
newspapers with mastheads and captions but without models as archetypes of the challenge posed by reality
the accompanying articles, so that the diΩerent editorial testing amid widespread image replication and
priorities of various news sources are materialized dissemination. Actors and models are, of course, both
in the size, placement, and choice of images. By selecting private individuals and performing personas, and as
and recontextualizing images from the mass media, such they embody the destabilized reality of a subject
often through forms of remediation that emphasize circulating through mass-cultural networks—and,
how an original is reiterated in subsequent milieus, it can be argued, they make literal photography’s
Charlesworth and other artists have used photography tendency to turn everything it depicts into a model:
to complicate and delegitimize that imagery’s the photographed subject photographed becomes the
immediacy, slowing it down, literally freezing it in time, prototype for future replications.13
to reveal undetected facets and overlooked functions. In Model #105M-R59C/Keystone Shower Door . . .
The creative possibilities of selecting and (2005, plate 191) Christopher Williams has rendered
rephotographing mass media imagery have been the blurring of object and subject with startling precision.
skillfully explored by Richard Prince, who has The photograph’s composition is divided by a frosted
acknowledged the crucial influence of his work in shower door that literally blurs part of a female model
the “tear-sheets department” at Time-Life in the 1970s whose simulated performance of hair washing is reiterated
where his job was to cut out magazine articles for the in the glass’s striated surface, which mimics the eΩects
company’s archives, but found his attention drawn of rivulets of water. Drawing upon antecedents such
to the array of discarded advertisements, the ostensible as German advertising from the 1960s and utilizing
background to the editorial copy.12 In Entertainers the technical apparatuses of high-end commercial
(1982–83, plate 178) Prince used his image-scavenging photography, Williams recreates rather than appropriates
skills to assemble twelve film stills and promotional mass media imagery; he examines its subtle strategies
headshots of what the work’s title suggests are actors and diΩerentiates his own work from it with scrupulous,
and models; he then reproduced them all at the same often esoteric historical references and slight visual
size and arranged them in a gridded array. In many disruptions that deconstruct its methods, such as
works from this period Prince photographed his source the reflections of the square lighting rig that appear
material in black-and-white film and then reprinted in the model’s eyes. In the series Unbranded:
them on color photographic paper, so that he could Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008
readjust the tones; here, his gallery of professional (2008, plate 202), Hank Willis Thomas has performed
performers has been oversaturated with intense, another kind of critical intervention in the commercial
unearthly hues that amplify their fundamental unreality. imagery of the past. The series is a survey of forty years’
The serial arrangement of found imagery—whether worth of advertising employing images of African
in a single print, like Prince’s work, or in a sequential Americans, from which the artist has removed all
installation or grouped in series, like Charlesworth’s, textual elements, thus providing an alternate history
McCollum’s, and Friedlander’s—has been employed by of sorts, of the representation of a demographic that
many artists who have used the camera as an instrument is marginalized in both mass media and culture at large.
for testing the reality of mass-cultural material. The The models appearing in his altered images have

12 13

Richard Prince, Why I Go to the On the relationship between models

Movies Alone (New York: Barbara and artistic representation, see Wendy
Gladstone Gallery, 1994), p. 55. Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The
Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).

194
 ostensibly been liberated from the task of commercial ensnare the subject in a mise en abyme in which preexisting
persuasion (if not the commodities they market), yet representations are the basis for subsequent pictures,
they remain subjugated by the numerous signs around thus shaping the viewer’s and photographer’s engagement
them, by their clothing and hairstyles and gestures, with the world, whether photographically or not.
which all suggest specific cultural values that transcend Collier has described her crisp, nearly documentary
any particular product. style as “forensic,” and other artists have adopted similar
For many artists, the figure of the model serves as investigative perspectives in appropriating images from
a privileged symbol for the ways in which mass media the wider world of photography.14 Indeed, a certain
imagery deeply inform aspects of subjectivity. In her criminological lexicon informs several foundational
Untitled Film Stills (1977–80, plates 180–82) Cindy statements on photographic appropriation of mass-
Sherman enacts a stereotypical female role that seems media imagery: Prince has characterized his practice
to have been inspired by a cinematic convention. as a form of “stealing (pirating) already existing images,”
Simultaneously self-portraits and fictional portrayals, and Douglas Crimp, one of the first critics to extensively
these works suggest that the performance of femininity consider this practice, has noted that mass media
is simultaneously representational and existential, photography often appears “purloined” and “stolen”
or, more critically, they reveal the fundamental when recontextualized as art.15 Lyle Ashton Harris
interconnectedness of the two. Sanja Iveković’s Double brings the implications of this process to the fore
Life series (1976, plate 176) takes this conflation to a in The Watering Hole (1996, plate 204), in which nine
point at which the question of who is and who is not large-scale color photographs document segments of
a model becomes unclear. By identifying, in pairs of even larger veneer panels on which the artist arranged
images, a≈nities between physical gestures in her own more than a hundred diverse images and objects,
personal snapshots and those of professional models including police reports on the JeΩrey Dahmer case,
in advertisements, Iveković has revealed the pervasive Ziploc bags, Post-it notes, film stills, postcards,
and often unconscious influence of such imagery, and and magazine pages, along with the artist’s own
the series even insinuates an uncanny reversal of the photographic works and snapshots. The Watering
typical dynamics of model and audience: occasionally Hole resembles a crime scene as much as a detective’s
Iveković’s snapshot preceded the commercial image, assembling of evidence, and it can be understood as
sometimes by more than a decade. the evidence that resulted from the artist’s investigation
A diΩerent synergy between model and representation into what he has called “the West’s fascination with
is evident in Anne Collier’s Book (John Rawlings) (2012, and consumption of black bodies.”16 Dahmer, the
plate 199), which shows a spread from 100 Studies of the notorious serial killer who cannibalized many of
Figure, a 1951 book by the fashion photographer John his victims, provides an unsettling metaphor for
Rawlings. Rawlings’s image shows a model sprawled on photography’s capacity to incorporate other media,
a Navajo blanket, and Collier photographed the book, laid as well as for the way we consume these images in
open flat, from above, so that the model sprawls across the process of forging an identity. Although the work’s
the pages as well. Collier’s selection of this particular title evokes the communal possibilities of the shared
image reinforces the circle of representation and looking: mass-cultural lexicon, its nonhierarchical conjunction
the model, Evelyn Frey, is shown gazing at another of personal and public imagery suggests the challenges,
photograph of herself—also by Rawlings, but not included and even perhaps the dangers, of locating a “real”
among the hundred images of her used in the book. The self in a world teeming with images produced by
logic of photographic replication here seems to forcefully technologies of replication.

14 15

Anne Collier, in “In Between: Tom Prince, “Practicing without a License

McDonough in conversation with (1977),” in Nancy Spector, Richard
Anne Collier,” Fantom Photographic Prince (New York: Guggenheim
Quarterly 4 (Summer 2010): 79. Museum, 2007), p. 29; Douglas
Crimp, “The Photographic Activity
of Postmodernism,” October 15
(Winter 1980): 98.

16

Lyle Ashton Harris, in Michael Cohen,

“Overture: Lyle Ashton Harris,” Flash
Art, May–June 1996, p. 107.

Photography and/as Mass Media 195