Though Photoshopping and digital retouching have become common practices in both journalistic and creative photography, Martha Rosler’s recent work foregrounds the process, creating deliberately artificial digital collages that create jarring juxtapositions of familiar imagery. Her 1960’s collages combined imagery from the Vietnam War with domestic images from advertising, and her recent work continues that same theme, addressing the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan while also confronting a more contemporary visual aesthetic, to create pixilated mash-ups of commercialism and injustice, images whose incongruence forces the viewers to re-think the aims and styles of two parallel trends in image-making. Rosler will conduct a conversation about her work, followed by a book signing, at the Paramount Theater on Saturday, June 15. Theater of Drones is on display at the Freedom of Speech Wall through early July.
Listen to Rosler’s discussion of her work: http://http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Coi_GQ7pOt8
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