The Other Series (After Kertész)

Kathy Grove

1989–90 · Gelatin silver print · Photographs

In the late 1980s Grove, an artist who supports herself as a professional photo retoucher, began seamlessly altering images of famous works of art, using bleach, dyes, and airbrush to remove the female figure from each image and leaving the rest of the scene intact. Her cunning excisions mimic the process by which art historians, echoing the culture at large, have erased the achievements of actual women while enshrining Woman as a blank screen upon which the ideas and desires of both artist and viewer are projected. If photographs are presumed to represent the truth, Grove’s pictures remind us to ask: Whose truth?

Artist

Kathy Grove

Date

1989–90

Medium

Gelatin silver print

Department

Photographs

Credit line

Purchase, Charina Foundation Inc. Gift, 2010