ABSTRACT
The library of congress website makes available a treasure trove of copyright-free historic files that image makers can download. Such works can be recycled by being transformed or combined with other work. The before and after example of a Library of Congress image, manipulated by Aragoncillo, explores this question in interesting ways. The idealized wallpaper or studio landscape has been swapped for an actual landscape. This landscape contains a fence and barbed wire. The fence and barbed wire conjure associations with some of the most monumental occurrences since the image's likely inception: two World Wars, the Berlin Wall, and the Cold War. The fence posts denote decaying and soot-streaked remnants of the Industrial Revolution. The reverence of nature by the original inhabitants of the North American continent is not represented in the reality of another version of impoverished ghettos, far from the inner cities, the Native American "Reservations".
