ICONOGRAPHIES, 2013
Iconographies comprises a series of press portraits of Cold War-era political, military and religious leaders, each bearing its newspaper editor's original retouches and annotations.
The marked photographs reveal an uncanny visual language that at times seems to belie its ostensible functionality. Selected from archives of over half a million images, these picture-desk proofs, originally intended to be reduced in scale and printed alongside news commentary, have instead been enlarged and de-captioned, but remain otherwise unaltered. Sold off at auctions that are in themselves a reflection on the decline of print journalism, such relics from a pre-digital age speak to both the careful construction of ideological agendas and the theatricality of popular politics.
Iconographies, 2013. C-type prints; dimensions variable.