July 31, 1964
• Six days before, Andy Warhol filmed Empire from the 41st floor of the Time-Life building.
• Ranger 7 sent back analog photos from the moon to NASA that would become the first digitally enhanced images.
• I was in Bound Brook, New Jersey celebrating my grandfather’s 59th birthday, eating devil’s food cake made from a Betty Crocker mix.
As a child, I ate pop tarts for breakfast, fluffernutters for lunch and TV dinners at night. I spent hours describing second by second ads I had seen on TV to my mother who worked in consumer marketing. I am a product of the popular culture of the 1960s. This popular culture also ignited Pop Art and its deflation of the aims of art. The medium in which I work was also being formed at that time. The Ranger 7 mission marks a landmark in the history of digital imaging. The coincidence of this date with my grandfather’s birthday allows me to locate myself on that day in the parallel world of childhood in suburban New Jersey where swimming and ice cream were important and the Civil Rights movement and the Cold War floated around the edges. This coincidence also makes it concrete that the summer of 1964 is far, far away. Just over 40 years ago, my sharpest memories are evoked by foods or old photographs. But I can’t really remember what it was like to be 5 years old or even what it was like to live without personal computers, cell phones and the Internet. This impossibility of remembering the past inspired A History of the 20th Century.
Because you are what you eat, A History of the 20th Century transforms images of convenience foods into icons of their time. In this series, I have photographed ten foods whose dates of invention span the century, one approximately for every decade. Each product was photographed in the studio at or larger than life-size with attention to traditional photographic vocabulary. This photograph then literally became the ingredients for a drawing of a political celebrity of the same year. Foods and personalities were matched by date. Both were chosen as representative products of their time. However just as TV dinners now come in black plastic microwaveable trays and not the aluminum trays of the 50s and 60s, an image of any of these men has different connotations than it did during their lifetime. Titled by the year of invention of the food, each pair speaks louder about our own time than the year of its title.
Each of the 10 prints of A History of the 20th Century consists of a color photograph and a “drawing” that is a rearrangement of small squares of the photograph. The blocks of pixels of the photograph are broken up often into as many as 3,000 separate squares and rearranged and composited into the second image. This drawing process matches, square by square, the tonal values and hues of the source image, the photograph, to the destination image, the drawing. The photograph is the raw material out of which the drawing is made. Both images consist of the exact same pixels. Using the simple means of cutting and pasting, a still life photograph morphs into a portrait. If the medium is the message or the massage as the case might be, this transformation serves as a metaphor for the transformation of experience into memory and history.