acceptance of the camera as an incorruptible instru-
ment of truth.’’
A whole generation of what became known as
conceptual photographers (or ‘‘media artists’’, as
critic Irving Sandler calls them) emerged from of
the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) in
Los Angeles. An influential figure was John Baldes-
sari, who first used the term ‘‘post-studio art’’ to
designate those practices, very fashionable in the
late 1970s, which exceeded straight painting or
sculpture. Opening formalist aesthetics to the exam-
ination of art’s potential social and political engage-
ment, Baldessari’s art and teaching were informed
by production and presentation strategies culled
from disciplines outside the traditional confines of
fine art, such as commercial photography and mass
media imagery. Baldessari, a generation older than
many of his students who received early fame, was
himself finally recognized as an important artist in
the 1980s with works such asThe Little Red Cap,
1982 andHanging Man with Sunglasses, 1984.
Once the stability of traditional artistic categories
was successfully challenged by photography in the
late 1970s into the 1980s, attention was transferred
to the politics of image making by photographic as
well as by more traditional means. Indeed, postmo-
dernism emerges as a dominant fine arts ideology at
the same time as political and social dimensions
appear widely in art-making as both methodology
and subject matter. More important, photography
and the critical thinking that accompanied it in the
1980s are so interwoven that the full impact of
works often cannot be understood without refer-
ence to their theoretical contexts.
In the preface ofThe Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on
Postmodern Culture, Hal Foster makes an important
distinction between two kinds of postmodernism: a
postmodernism of resistance and a postmodernism
of reaction. According to Foster, the former ‘‘seeks
to deconstruct modernism and resist the status
quo,’’ while the latter repudiates modernist tradition
in order to celebrate those normative structures that
perpetuate cultural conservatism and its interests.
(p. xii) If conceptual photographers and media
artists were the tenants of the former type of post-
modernism, the latter was associated with painting,
dominated the art-world of the 1980s.
Photography was valued over painting by those
who promoted deconstruction theory because of its
perceived ‘‘relevance,’’ that is, its capacity to func-
tion as a critical agent capable of raising questions
about contemporary society, its values, and its sym-
bols. Painting, and more specifically neo-expressio-
nist painting that emerged in the late 1970s and
early 1980s and that was rooted in the heroic ges-
ture of the artist in search of transcendence, was
considered by oppositional postmodernists as
regressive and ahistoric, promoting a conception
of the artwork as a luxury commodity, ready to be
exchanged in the marketplace.
Perhaps as a result of this reaction against neo-
expressionism, the 1980s in the United States saw the
emergence of the tactics of appropriation or simula-
tion. These strategies were also a reaction to the
dominant ideology of the mass media. Artists like
Sherrie Levine, Barbara Kruger, Richard Prince, or
Martha Rosler sought to deconstruct myths of Amer-
ican culture as they shaped or were manifested in
everyday life by willfully ‘rephotographing’ famous
photographs and signing them as their own or
through using found, anonymous imagery.
As an art director in the 1970s, Barbara Kruger
worked for Conde ́Nast publications, whose legend-
ary art directors had nurtured and shaped many of
the premier photographers of the twentieth century.
This experience provided her a sense of how maga-
zines manipulate their readers through photogra-
phy as well as graphic skills that she employed in
her subsequent art work. As she noted, ‘‘It’s the
magazine’s duty to make you their image of their
own perfection.’’ Employing collage and photo-
montage, techniques used by avant-garde artists of
the 1920s and 1930s including Hannah Ho ̈ch and
John Heartfield, Kruger re-inscribed these visual
strategies in a contemporary context, focusing on
representation as an instrument of power and a
regulator of sexual difference. In works such as
‘‘Untitled’’ (Your gaze hits the side of my face),
1981 and‘‘Untitled’’ (Buy me I’ll change your life),
1984, Kruger demonstrates how photography can
serve as a means of addressing questions about
language, sexuality, representation, commodities,
and the relationships among them, expanding the
perspectives and possibilities of feminist art. Pre-
existing images, lifted from their original contexts
and reproduced in black and white, are open to new
interpretations. Thus Kruger demonstrates that the
meaning of a photograph lies on its social use and
context more than on what is inherent in the image.
As can be seen in Kruger’s work, much of the
most important artistic production of the 1980s is
directly concerned with photography’s capacity for
creating and imposing social stereotypes. Many
artists explored the visual potential offered by mass
imagery and advertising, blurring the limits between
high art and popular culture by use of photography.
Another paradigmatic artist of the 1980s is Richard
Prince. Prince also began his career working at a
commercial photography concern, the clippings
department of Time-Life publications. In the base-HISTORY OF PHOTOGRAPHY: THE 1980S