Reality Testing
to the perhaps more socially important manufactured
Robert Slifkin
Robert Heinecken’s lithograph Are You Rea #1 (1964–68,
plate 171) asks a crucial question that has occupied many
artists, and in particular those working with photography,
since the 1960s: what constitutes reality in a culture that
seems increasingly technologically mediated, increasingly
commercialized, and increasingly suspicious of established
verities—in short, in a culture that seems increasingly
unreal? The text, deliberately truncated, that appears
in the image may be understood to question either the
realness of the figures it accompanies or their readiness
(in fact the advertisement from which it is taken asks,
“Are You Ready?”). Heinecken’s inventive photogram
technique, in which a sheet of black-and-white
photographic paper is exposed to a page from a popular
magazine set upon a light box, so that both sides of the
page register simultaneously on the final print, makes
explicit the duplicity—the literal two-sidedness—of
the source material. Although the manifest object of such
reality testing appears to be a woman taking oΩ her shirt
to reveal her brassiere, when she is seen in conjunction
with the page’s exposed verso imagery—a domestic
interior with wooden blinds and an Eero Saarinen–style
chair, the hourglass shape of which echoes the strap and
cup of the bra’s right side—the uncertainty of the title
shifts to refer, perhaps, to the magazine layout itself.
The uncanny correspondences between the two sides
include a woman on the verso who is shown at a smaller
scale but with a similar haircut, and the intersection
of an almost perfect triangle rising from the navel of the
larger figure with a smaller triangle of a rug in the domestic
shot; these echoes amplify a feeling of skepticism about
the reality depicted in the pages of the magazine and
suggest a sinister complicity among the makers of
images—and the images themselves—in the world
of commercial mass culture.
Are you real? This is an understandable question
to pose of what Heinecken described as the “printed
promotional material” that was the primary subject
of his project. The ensuing pictures, he wrote, “do
1 and the Arts (Chicago: University
Robert Heinecken, preface of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 3–28.
to the portfolio Are You Rea,
(Los Angeles, 1968). Are You Rea #1 3 Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press,
serves as the introductory plate One of the first exhibitions to feature
to the portfolio of twenty-five prints. Pop art was The New Realists, which
took place at the Sidney Janis Gallery
2 in autumn 1962.
On “looking through” versus “looking
at” in twentieth-century cultural 4 in Modern Art and the Common
production, see Richard A. Lanham, The On the increasing role of photography
Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, in commercial advertising in the
192
not represent firsthand experiences, but are related
experiences which are being created daily by the
mass media.”1 In one sense Heinecken’s technique
undermines the highly mediated imagery by literally
doubling its tactics, allowing viewers to look through
rather than look at it.2 His use of everyday source
material invests his works with a directness that shares
certain characteristics associated with Pop art, which
was frequently described by its earliest critics in the
1960s as a form of “new realism,” but it also points
to the crucial, frequently problematic relationship
between photography as an artistic practice and its
commercial applications.3 Because photography
superseded hand-drawn illustration as the primary
means of representation in advertisements in the late
1950s, artists using photography were in many regards
better situated than painters and sculptors to perceive
the complex dynamics informing mass media imagery
and in turn to engage with both its form and content.4
In the mid-nineteenth century, soon after photography
was invented, a conception of modern art emerged that
positioned itself as a sophisticated foil for its demotic
other, oΩering a beneficial dose of authenticity and
criticality that seemed unavailable with more popular
formats.5 Yet photography, a medium that since its
inception has been used for a variety of nonaesthetic
purposes (from family portraits to scientific illustration
to commercial illustration), has had a more complicated
and complex relation to mass culture. Because of its
essential-seeming association with technological
reproduction, photography has played an instrumental,
even foundational role in the expansion and dissemination
of mass media, in fact existing and even thriving in
various mass media outlets well before it was generally
accepted as a fine art. Many of its most accomplished
practitioners, such as Edward Steichen, Walker Evans,
and Henri Cartier-Bresson, moved e≈ciently between
commercial and aesthetic realms while managing to
keep the two distinct.6 In 1927 the Bauhaus luminary
László Moholy-Nagy noted that photography’s essential
relationship to technological innovation made it ideally
suited to the rhetoric of novelty that drives the world
of marketing, declaring, “Photography in advertising
is not an alien conception.”7 Irving Penn wittily
second half of the 1950s and its role 6
in Andy Warhol’s career, see Thomas See for example, Patricia Johnston, Real
Crow, The Long March of Pop (New Fantasies: Edward Steichen’s Advertising
Photography (Berkeley: University of
2014), pp. 174–84. California Press, 1999); David Campany,
Walker Evans: The Magazine Work
5 (Göttingen, Germany: Steidl, 2014);
The definitive study of this dynamic is and Peter Galassi, “For the Printed Page:
Crow, “Modernism and Mass Culture,” Cartier-Bresson’s Work in the Periodical
Press,” in Henri Cartier-Bresson: The
Culture (New Haven, Conn.: Yale Modern Century (New York: The Museum
University Press, 1996), pp. 3–37. of Modern Art, 2010), pp. 328–53.
 acknowledged this productive confusion in an elegant
still life of frozen food—a thoroughly modern commodity
that slyly parodies photography’s capacity to “freeze”
its subjects (1977, plate 195). In this anti–still life, the
artist subtly elaborated on the message of vanitas and
memento mori by using color photography, a format
that until the 1970s was generally eschewed by many
fine art photographers because of its impermanence
and the instability of its tonal registrations, as well
as its longstanding association with advertising.
A diΩerent sort of freezing of mass-cultural artifacts
takes place in Lee Friedlander’s Aloha, Washington
(1967, plate 173), in which the photographer has captured
a televised image of President Lyndon B. Johnson
beneath a collection of family portraits and mass-
produced commodities such as a clock, an antenna
(ornamentally bordered by a doily and kitschy
angels), and the television set itself. Evans, drawing
on modernism’s longstanding antipathy toward low
culture, celebrated Friedlander’s television portraits as
“spanking little poems of hate” revealing the “unearthly
pall” that the “reflected light from home television boxes
casts over the quotidian objects and accouterments
we all live with.”8 This merciless description figures
television as the vulgar inverse of photography,
indiscriminately casting light outward from the screen
of the receiver rather than purposefully capturing
it within the lens of the camera. Friedlander’s adroit
composition of preexisting imagery asserts the camera’s
capacity to encompass a wide spectrum of objects and,
unlike the emitted light of the television, to organize
them through the selective gaze of the photographer.
Created more than twenty years later, Allan
McCollum’s Perpetual Photograph works (1985, plate 189)
expand on this transcendence of (and dissolution into)
mass culture, paradoxically transforming the moving
scan lines of the television screen into static—and thus
perpetual—abstractions. To make them, McCollum
photographed scenes in television programs that
featured photographs in the background, and he then
enlarged that section of the background (the original
full photographs are attached to the backs of the works).
The results, with their implied correspondence between
the particulate grain of the photographic print and the
pixelated surface of the television monitor, suggest a
less antagonistic relationship with mass culture than the
one proposed by Friedlander. The televised photograph
has been rematerialized, from light rays back into
an object, into what we might call a remedial image,
whose unintelligible haziness elucidates the limits
of representational veracity. Such acts of remediation
may allow artists to invest mass media imagery with
critical insight, and high artistic practice with the
immediacy and power of low cultural imagery (such
as advertising) while still setting itself apart from it.9
In their representation and incorporation of other
forms of mass media, both Aloha, Washington and
the Perpetual Photograph works can be understood
to demonstrate what the artist JeΩ Wall has described
as the “rethinking and ‘refunctioning’ of reportage”10
that has characterized art photography since the 1960s.
Here, the idiom of objective documentation is applied
to the realm of art and, more generally, to the dynamics
of representation rather than to real events and people
in the world. If earlier photographers typically pursued
their subject with a “hunter’s consciousness,” as
Friedlander put it, patiently staking out their subjects
and waiting for Henri Cartier-Bresson’s decisive
moment to capture their picture, in these two works
the photographers had to be equally vigilant, keeping
watch over their television screens so as not to miss
an evocative conjunction in the televised image
or between it and its domestic setting.11 Thus they
aligned the readiness of the camera operator with the
evanescent—and uncertain—realness of the mediated
subject on the screen.
The tradition of the decisive moment was transformed
by artists who produced images not by pursuing the
dynamic flux of external reality but by searching through
the standardized and historically diverse archive of
mass-cultural images. Although the act of selection has
always been a crucial element of photography, through
the perimeter of the viewfinder and in darkroom
practices such as cropping, in the 1970s artists
increasingly made the very act of selection, not in the
viewfinder but in the world itself, the central subject
of their work, so that the encounter between the artist
and the mass-produced image, as well as its subsequent
representation, were as decisive as the dynamic instant
captured by the photographer in the street. Sarah

7 8 9 10

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

Ibid., p. 146.

Photography and/as Mass Media 193

Charlesworth’s Movie-Television-News-History, June 21,
1979 (1979, plate 185) catalogues the media coverage
of a murder. The journalist Bill Stewart was killed by a
Nicaraguan soldier on June 20, 1979, and the next day
Charlesworth tracked the event in twenty-seven diΩerent
newspapers, revealing the event’s circuitous route
from newsreel film to televised video to photographic
reproduction. Charlesworth opted to display the
newspapers with mastheads and captions but without
the accompanying articles, so that the diΩerent editorial
priorities of various news sources are materialized
in the size, placement, and choice of images. By selecting
and recontextualizing images from the mass media,
often through forms of remediation that emphasize
how an original is reiterated in subsequent milieus,
Charlesworth and other artists have used photography
to complicate and delegitimize that imagery’s
immediacy, slowing it down, literally freezing it in time,
to reveal undetected facets and overlooked functions.
The creative possibilities of selecting and
rephotographing mass media imagery have been
skillfully explored by Richard Prince, who has
acknowledged the crucial influence of his work in
the “tear-sheets department” at Time-Life in the 1970s
where his job was to cut out magazine articles for the
company’s archives, but found his attention drawn
to the array of discarded advertisements, the ostensible
background to the editorial copy.12 In Entertainers
(1982–83, plate 178) Prince used his image-scavenging
skills to assemble twelve film stills and promotional
headshots of what the work’s title suggests are actors
and models; he then reproduced them all at the same
size and arranged them in a gridded array. In many
works from this period Prince photographed his source
material in black-and-white film and then reprinted
them on color photographic paper, so that he could
readjust the tones; here, his gallery of professional
performers has been oversaturated with intense,
unearthly hues that amplify their fundamental unreality.
The serial arrangement of found imagery—whether
in a single print, like Prince’s work, or in a sequential
installation or grouped in series, like Charlesworth’s,
McCollum’s, and Friedlander’s—has been employed by
many artists who have used the camera as an instrument
for testing the reality of mass-cultural material. The
12
Richard Prince, Why I Go to the
Movies Alone (New York: Barbara
Gladstone Gallery, 1994), p. 55.
194
repetition of cultural stereotypes isolated from their
intended contexts exposes their utter conventionality
and thus undermines their tenacious rhetoric of
naturalness. Serial techniques are thus a compelling
means of examining the representational codes of a
mass culture whose very ubiquity makes such codes at
once ideologically eΩective and generally undetectable.
Like Prince, other artists have presented actors and
models as archetypes of the challenge posed by reality
testing amid widespread image replication and
dissemination. Actors and models are, of course, both
private individuals and performing personas, and as
such they embody the destabilized reality of a subject
circulating through mass-cultural networks—and,
it can be argued, they make literal photography’s
tendency to turn everything it depicts into a model:
the photographed subject photographed becomes the
prototype for future replications.13
In Model #105M-R59C/Keystone Shower Door . . .
(2005, plate 191) Christopher Williams has rendered
the blurring of object and subject with startling precision.
The photograph’s composition is divided by a frosted
shower door that literally blurs part of a female model
whose simulated performance of hair washing is reiterated
in the glass’s striated surface, which mimics the eΩects
of rivulets of water. Drawing upon antecedents such
as German advertising from the 1960s and utilizing
the technical apparatuses of high-end commercial
photography, Williams recreates rather than appropriates
mass media imagery; he examines its subtle strategies
and diΩerentiates his own work from it with scrupulous,
often esoteric historical references and slight visual
disruptions that deconstruct its methods, such as
the reflections of the square lighting rig that appear
in the model’s eyes. In the series Unbranded:
Reflections in Black by Corporate America 1968–2008
(2008, plate 202), Hank Willis Thomas has performed
another kind of critical intervention in the commercial
imagery of the past. The series is a survey of forty years’
worth of advertising employing images of African
Americans, from which the artist has removed all
textual elements, thus providing an alternate history
of sorts, of the representation of a demographic that
is marginalized in both mass media and culture at large.
The models appearing in his altered images have
13
On the relationship between models
and artistic representation, see Wendy
Steiner, The Real Real Thing: The
Model in the Mirror of Art (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2010).
 ostensibly been liberated from the task of commercial
persuasion (if not the commodities they market), yet
they remain subjugated by the numerous signs around
them, by their clothing and hairstyles and gestures,
which all suggest specific cultural values that transcend
any particular product.
For many artists, the figure of the model serves as
a privileged symbol for the ways in which mass media
imagery deeply inform aspects of subjectivity. In her
Untitled Film Stills (1977–80, plates 180–82) Cindy
Sherman enacts a stereotypical female role that seems
to have been inspired by a cinematic convention.
Simultaneously self-portraits and fictional portrayals,
these works suggest that the performance of femininity
is simultaneously representational and existential,
or, more critically, they reveal the fundamental
interconnectedness of the two. Sanja Iveković’s Double
Life series (1976, plate 176) takes this conflation to a
point at which the question of who is and who is not
a model becomes unclear. By identifying, in pairs of
images, a≈nities between physical gestures in her own
personal snapshots and those of professional models
in advertisements, Iveković has revealed the pervasive
and often unconscious influence of such imagery, and
the series even insinuates an uncanny reversal of the
typical dynamics of model and audience: occasionally
Iveković’s snapshot preceded the commercial image,
sometimes by more than a decade.
A diΩerent synergy between model and representation
is evident in Anne Collier’s Book (John Rawlings) (2012,
plate 199), which shows a spread from 100 Studies of the
Figure, a 1951 book by the fashion photographer John
Rawlings. Rawlings’s image shows a model sprawled on
a Navajo blanket, and Collier photographed the book, laid
open flat, from above, so that the model sprawls across
the pages as well. Collier’s selection of this particular
image reinforces the circle of representation and looking:
the model, Evelyn Frey, is shown gazing at another
photograph of herself—also by Rawlings, but not included
among the hundred images of her used in the book. The
logic of photographic replication here seems to forcefully
ensnare the subject in a mise en abyme in which preexisting
representations are the basis for subsequent pictures,
thus shaping the viewer’s and photographer’s engagement
with the world, whether photographically or not.
Collier has described her crisp, nearly documentary
style as “forensic,” and other artists have adopted similar
investigative perspectives in appropriating images from
the wider world of photography.14 Indeed, a certain
criminological lexicon informs several foundational
statements on photographic appropriation of mass-
media imagery: Prince has characterized his practice
as a form of “stealing (pirating) already existing images,”
and Douglas Crimp, one of the first critics to extensively
consider this practice, has noted that mass media
photography often appears “purloined” and “stolen”
when recontextualized as art.15 Lyle Ashton Harris
brings the implications of this process to the fore
in The Watering Hole (1996, plate 204), in which nine
large-scale color photographs document segments of
even larger veneer panels on which the artist arranged
more than a hundred diverse images and objects,
including police reports on the JeΩrey Dahmer case,
Ziploc bags, Post-it notes, film stills, postcards,
and magazine pages, along with the artist’s own
photographic works and snapshots. The Watering
Hole resembles a crime scene as much as a detective’s
assembling of evidence, and it can be understood as
the evidence that resulted from the artist’s investigation
into what he has called “the West’s fascination with
and consumption of black bodies.”16 Dahmer, the
notorious serial killer who cannibalized many of
his victims, provides an unsettling metaphor for
photography’s capacity to incorporate other media,
as well as for the way we consume these images in
the process of forging an identity. Although the work’s
title evokes the communal possibilities of the shared
mass-cultural lexicon, its nonhierarchical conjunction
of personal and public imagery suggests the challenges,
and even perhaps the dangers, of locating a “real”
self in a world teeming with images produced by
technologies of replication.

14 15

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

McDonough in conversation with
Anne Collier,” Fantom Photographic
Quarterly 4 (Summer 2010): 79.
(1977),” in Nancy Spector, Richard
Prince (New York: Guggenheim
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