After Walker Evans: 2

Sherrie Levine

1981 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, a group of artists including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine—at the time dubbed the "Pictures" generation—began using photography to examine the strategies and codes of representation. In reshooting Marlboro advertisements, B-movie stills, and even classics of Modernist photography, these artists adopted dual roles as director and spectator. In their manipulated appropriations, these artists were not only exposing and dissembling mass-media fictions, but enacting more complicated scenarios of desire, identification, and loss. In 1981, Levine photographed reproductions of Depression-era photographs by Walker Evans, such as this famous portrait of a family of Alabama sharecroppers. The series, entitled After Walker Evans, became a landmark of postmodernism, both praised and attacked as a feminist hijacking of patriarchal authority, a critique of the commodification of art, and an elegy on the death of modernism. Far from being a high-concept cheap shot, Levine's works from this series elucidate our nostalgic desire to invest historical images with an innocence their contemporary counterparts cannot claim.

Artist

Sherrie Levine

Date

1981

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of the artist, 1995