Part 2 - Exercise 2.2 Sherrie Levine "After Walker Evans"

The “Pictures Generation” were a group of conceptual artists in the late 70’s and 80s who started to use photography and appropriation of archival images with the purpose of looking at techniques of visual representation.

This group included Sherrie Levine who re-photographed reproduction images of modernist photographers which included the work of Walker Evans. Interestingly the photographed images, though of modern production, where so alike the reproduced photographs that they were near indistinguishable

I ask myself where is the creativity of rephotographing a printed image? What would drive someone to do this, why would people want to look at these images rather than the reproduced originals?

Levine exhibited her images as a series named “Untitled, After Evans”

The series was met by mixed acclaim. Personally I am not surprised, what do these new images give us that the originals (though reproduced) didn’t?

Whilst many argued that the original images were authentic and offered an insight into reality. However Levine argued that by re-photographing the images she is criticising the notion of reality, the originals just represent a choice of the original photographer in terms of composition, lighting and subject etc. Personally I don’t buy into this, it is appropriation if reflected as the original was taken. I don’t see what Levine offers new that Walker Evans didn’t originally, there is no originality in the image. Post modernist art critic Craig Owen claimed Levine is stressing the act of appropriation e.g. that Walker Evans himself appropriated the images.

I disagree there is originality in the images originally taken. Thought was likely put into the capture of the images, posing or just a capture of the moment. That specific decision to press the shutter release having framed the image is the original decision. Had Levine appropriated the images and herself done something different with them artistically I would be able to see what she did as being art. Did she do this simply to make a statement? I note that its Craig Owen rather than Sherrie Levine who explains her decision and her intent.

Walker Evans was originally commissioned to document through photography life in the American Deep South at the height of the Great Depression. Evans has made significant choices in how he demonstrates life. Had Levine examined all images, selected specific images to rephotograph for the desire of expressing something or perhaps make a pattern from the original series I could better understand what she was trying to achieve.

Levine didn’t see her images as copies, but as iterations. Levine challenged the notion of ownership. In today’s world if she publishes this work as her own I do wonder if the copyright has not been given up by Walker Evans how this would be interpreted legally.

Perhaps some see truth in what Levine says,  Sontag appears to agree with this line of thinking "To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed" . Yet the decisive moment has gone, it can only be captured once. If you simply copy and repeat what more are you offering the viewer that what he hasn't already seen?

Levine’s words were ‘The ‘after’ in these works denotes more than the condition of derivation or indebtedness. It is also the temporal and historical ‘after’ as in; ‘Our world comes after Walker Evans’’’ [1].