Scent

Frank Majore

1984 · Silver dye bleach print · Photographs

In his works from the 1980s, Majore built upon Richard Prince’s earlier critique of advertising imagery—how our own desires can never be untangled from the manufactured fantasies of commercial culture. Whereas Prince used a barely-there repertoire of reshooting, cropping, and tinting the commercial imagery of Philip Morris and other companies, Majore can be best described as a kind of post-appropriationist. He consciously adopts the techniques and strategies of the adman or the commercial artist to create effects-laden images that reflect our preference for illusion and mystification over humdrum, disappointing reality. Scent belongs to a small subset of pictures in which the artist includes actual commodity objects placed front and center, thus even more perversely blurring the distinction between unique artwork and mass produced image.

Artist

Frank Majore

Date

1984

Medium

Silver dye bleach print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Gift of the artist, 2010