ABSTRACT
This chapter examines a range of appropriation strategies in relation to photography and asks how recent changes in the access and availability of images have shifted the nature of appropriation, and moreover, what the implications are for appropriation as an artistic device. It explores both the nature and complexity of the so-called Pictures Generation artists of the 1980s such as Sherrie Levine and Richard Prince, who used purloined images (often from the art world and advertising, among other sources) to question commonly held ideas around authorship and originality, as well as examining appropriation’s larger role within the history of photography that extends back from the recent search-generated images of Zhang Dali, to the images of American “para-photographer” Robert Heinecken, to the photomontages of Berlin Dadaists such as Hannah Hoch, and beyond.
