Pictures Generation
Photography
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Pictures Generation
Pictures Generation is a generation of American artists who became important in the 1970s.
They were the image culture generation, which grew up with television in a society eager to consume under a constant bombardment of visual messages.
It was the world of immediacy, of the instantaneous, of images replacing words. These artists appropriated the visual resources of advertising in general, television, cinema, and magazines. With a critical sense, they gave us their view of a “ready to be consumed” world.
Art seduced with the resources of marketing. And not only was photography the language of these artists, but also video, cinema, and performance.
It was a time where the dream of love and peace of the counterculture was crushed by consumerism, by individualism, by immediate pleasure, and by the image. Artists of that generation took a critical stance and expressed themselves using the same tools they condemned. That is why we appreciate in their works a lot of sarcasm: something seems to be glorified, but the real goal is to criticize it.
At that time, the incidence of the media in people’s lives was such that it became the theme of great philosophers and essayists of the time (such as Barthes and Foucault). The Pictures Generation absorbed these theories and used art to expose and satirize the new reality. Philosophers and thinkers attacked the image culture with words, and artists gave it a taste of its own medicine.
The images that these artists produced were usually references to others that were already well installed by the media in the minds of the observers. They used what we call “cultural stereotypes” (those images or concepts that we have incorporated because we have seen them repeated ad nauseam).
As an example, we can mention a series by Cindy Sherman, where she photographed herself as if she were the protagonist of stills from B movies. She criticized the media’s promotion of a stereotypical model of women. Richard Prince, for example, appropriated images from advertisements to create his works. His idea was to use the images of mass culture, take them out of context, strip them of the purpose for which they were originally created, and so the message was more obvious.
Representative Photographers: Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Sherrie Levine, Jack Goldstein.
Image: Untitled #96. Cindy Sherman
Recommended links:
Social Documentary Photography.
Richard Avedon and the Secret of his Portraits.
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