Further Reading
Auping, Michael.Stephen Shore, Photographs. Sarasota,
Florida: John and Mabel Ringling Museum of Art,
1981.
Eauclaire, Sally.American Independents. New York: Abbe-
ville Press, 1987.
Eauclaire, Sally.New Color/New Work. New York: Abbe-
ville Press, 1984.
Eauclaire, Sally.The New Color Photography. New York:
Abbeville Press, 1981.
Haworth-Booth, Mark. ‘‘Amarillo – ‘Tall in Texas’ A Pro-
ject by Stephen Shore, 1971.’’Art on Paper5, no. 1
(September-October 2000).
Jenkins, William. New Topographics: Photographs of a
Man-altered Landscape. Rochester, New York: Interna-
tional Museum of Photography and Film, George East-
man House, 1975.
Kozloff, Max. ‘‘The Coming of Age of Color.’’Artforum
13, no. 5 (January 1975).LORNA SIMPSON
American
Lorna Simpson first found recognition for concep-
tual assemblages of photographs and text in the
mid-1980s. Her work is provocative in that it takes
on issues of race, gender, history, identity, and
communication, all themes of great interest to the
contemporary art audience of the late century. She
has utilized a number of photographic processes in
her work: black-and-white gelatin silver prints, dye
diffusion (Polaroid) color prints, photogravure
and photo-serigraphy (silk-screen) on felt. Her
early photographic work invites the viewer to
interpret both the image and the text and consider
their relationship. In this regard, Simpson’s work
has been compared to other women artists who use
text and documentary images such as Clarissa
Sligh, Cynthia Wiggins, Carrie Mae Weems, and
Barbara Kruger.
At the end of the century, she began to use a new
medium, video, which allowed her to more closely
capture the way meaning is developed in real-life
scenarios. Simpson has exhibited widely over the
last twenty years in the United States and abroad.
She has been the subject of numerous articles, has
had several artist residencies, participated in nu-
merous shows in major museums and galleries
throughout the United States and the world, has
had numerous solo exhibitions in the United States,
and is in the permanent collections of museums in
the United States and abroad.
Lorna Simpson was born in 1960 and raised in
Brooklyn, New York. She was trained in tradi-
tional photography at the School of Visual Arts,
New York. She began working with documentary
photography, but soon began to question the
‘‘objective’’ truth of this medium. Without forget-
ting photography’s usefulness as visual evidence,
she broke away from the traditions of her training.
By combining her interest in narrative with a doc-
umentary method, she found that she could better
address the themes of greatest interest to her. In
1990, five years after earning her Master’s degree in
Visual Arts from the University of California, San
Diego, Lorna Simpson was the first African Amer-
ican woman to represent the United States in the
Venice Biennale in Venice, Italy and to have a solo
exhibition in the ‘‘Projects’’ series of the Museum
of Modern Art in New York.
Simpson’s influences can be found in concep-
tual art, African narrative storytelling traditions
and nineteenth century documentary portraiture.
She is especially known for her use of models photo-
graphed with their backs to the viewer or their faces
not showing, as inWaterbearer, 1986;You’re Fine,
1988; andShe, 1992.Waterbearerpresents the image
of a black woman walking away from the viewer,
pouring water from two containers raised by both
arms. Three lines of text accompany the image: ‘‘She
saw him disappear by the river,’’ ‘‘They asked her
to tell what happened,’’ ‘‘Only to discount her mem-
ory.’’ This work prompted cultural critic Bell Hook
to remark:
Simpson’s use of language brings a threat to the fore. It
invites us to consider the production of history as a
cultural text, a narrative uncovering repressed or forgot-
ten memory. And it declares the existence of subjugated
knowledge.SHORE, STEPHEN