Feature: Sarah Charlesworth’s Image Archive
Sarah Charlesworth (1947 – 2013) left a rich archive of notebooks, slides, negatives, prints and source materials. To coincide with a presentation of works from the artist’s Objects of Desire series in the gallery’s viewing room, we are sharing some of the original materials she used to create these iconic photographs.
An art historian and critic as well as an artist, Charlesworth’s hand-written bibliography reveals some of the writers who influenced her own theories of photography.
To begin, Charlesworth selected and cut out images from a range of sources, such as fashion magazines, pornography, fanzines, and archeological textbooks.
She then arranged the cutouts on fields of monochrome, saturated color, and rephotographed them.
Objects of Desire is comprised of five sub-series, each focusing on the colors and formal attributes of a specific cultural arena. Objects of Desire I examined the language of gender and sexuality, Objects of Desire II explored the concept of nature as a kind of ideal or fantasy in our popular imaginations, and Objects of Desire III united themes of religion and spirituality.
In the final two sub-series of Objects of Desire, Charlesworth arranged the photographs in diptychs and triptychs. The multipanel works propose new syntactical relationships between images.
The finished Cibrachrome prints are presented in lacquered wood frames, and the original images have been preserved in the artist’s archive. The cutouts are arranged under sheets of vellum–some with Charlesworth’s notes–providing an unprecedented insight into her artistic process.
All images © The Estate of Sarah Charlesworth