As a young boy growing up in the 1940s at Western Avenue and 90th Street in South Los Angeles, Pat O’Neill occasionally went to the dump with his father as a way to pass the time. In those years, Los Angeles was quickly modernizing and entering the boom of midcentury consumerism, becoming a place where Hollywood met the growing aerospace, music, and fashion industries. These themes are evident in Bump City.
Asha Schechter is interested in how objects are rendered photographically. He brought these specific items together because they represent a wide variety of materials—paper, rubber, cardboard, wood, metal—each with different textures and behavioral qualities. He provided a 3D modeler with an image and a “skin” for each item so the modeler could render them virtually in three dimensions. The final work represents a flattening of that modeling, a return from three to two dimensions: the work is output as a large-scale photographic sticker adhered directly to the wall.
David Buchan was a vital part of the free-spirited artistic scene centered in downtown Toronto during the mid-1970s and 1980s. He regularly appeared as his alter ego, Lamonte del Monte, in performances, photo-text works, videos, and installations before shifting his focus in the mid-1980s to produce Cibachrome prints and transparencies, often at a large scale.
The image-based magazine Toiletpaper is the brainchild of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan and photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari. Toiletpaper made its debut in 2010, three years after Cattelan had ceased publishing the journal Permanent Food, which consisted of images torn from other magazines and republished. Cattelan teamed up with Ferrari—a commercial photographer whose background includes advertising work, branding campaigns, and Hollywood portraits—to ensure the images maintained a slick look and feel.
Lucas Blalock uses a combination of analog and digital photography to explore the way images of objects seduce us. He arranges still lifes in his studio and uses seamless colored backdrop paper, textured fabrics, mirrors, and professional lighting to photograph these setups with 4×5-inch film that he scans into the computer. He then uses Photoshop tools to crop, flip, and blur those images. He does not try to hide his maneuvers; instead he exposes them so the viewer can recognize and understand his visual manipulation.
In the images that comprise Kim Schoen’s Spread, books are precisely styled and staged in rotating positions so that their spines are often visible. The titles describe the books’ content, but the spines have a somewhat generic appearance, as they are missing the authors’ names and publishers’ marks. Five books are turned around to show empty interiors, revealing that these are hollow objects masquerading as literary tomes; their real purpose is to adorn bookcases being sold in furniture stores and advertisements.
DIS is an internet-centric art collective founded in New York in 2010. It began as the online periodical DIS Magazine, a hybrid lifestyle/fashion/art magazine organized around themes of labor, tweens, art school, stock, privacy, and disaster. In 2013, DIS established a stock-image library that manipulates the banal, frictionless, and saccharine styles of stock photography.
Victoria Fu investigates the disparity between the digital and physical worlds by combining analog images of her own making with digital images she acquires from stock photography sites.
The title of Roe Ethridge’s 2014 still-life photograph, Celine Bracelet for “Gentlewoman,” peels back the curtain, letting the viewer know that this is a magazine advertisement for a luxury brand. The photograph occupies two worlds: art and advertising. Similarly, the content of the photograph ranges from real to fake. A marble pear reverberates against the marble veneer backdrop and anchors the still life, which is dominated by grapes made of rubber with plastic leaves—materials often used in commercial food photography because they can withstand the hot lights of a set.
Christmas Gifts was the opening image of an editorial spread on gift giving published in the 1936 December issue of House Beautiful. In the early twentieth century, the type of modernist photography aesthetic practiced by Paul Outerbridge Jr.—which emphasized patterning and a tight crop—was actively promoted by magazine editors, including Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936. The public’s positive response to these high-style, artistic images served to popularize the trend.