Appropriation is the act of taking another already existent piece of work, adapting it and using it as your own. It is a common method of putting across ideas on social ideas and situations. It’s use in photography is often to satirize either a company or create a whole new image with it’s own meaning. photographers have been using appropriation for decades including people such as Richard Prince who famously appropriated the image of the cowboy riding a horse on the Marlboro advert, and then sold it on. He has done this more recently by taking photos from Instragram, the photo posting site, and sells them on (Heisler, 2015). This has caused a lot of controversy and other photographers are beginning to hate him for it (Bailey, 2015). Groups are beginning to gather together and have started using appropriation to further their goals such as Adbusters who like to using advertisements to portray new meanings or reflect the corporation they’re “spoofing” such as can be seen at https://www.adbusters.org/spoofads.
Appropriation 1
Here is my first look into Appropriation. Here I have taken an image of a well loved cartoon rabbit and inserted it into a Rimmel London make-up poster in the place of Georgia May Jagger. I have done this as a way of portraying how this sense of the “London Look” can appear false to other people and how this model is fairly famous among the laymen for her recognisable teeth; the teeth is what inspired me to look into rabbits. This concept of “the way we’re meant to look” also leads to stereotypes which are common such as Americans believing British people have bad teeth and this leads onto a bad state of competitive advertising between the nations.
What inspired me into this piece was looking into Appropriation in Photography and find an incident when W Magazine released what they called “The Art Issue” in November 2010 and it had images of the Kardashian sisters naked with their only cover being the statements “It’s all about me, I mean you, I mean me” which lead me onto the comedic satire of celebrities.
Appropriation 2
Here is my second look into appropriation. Here I have taken the original Morrisons logo including the symbol and name, removed letters and changed the slogan to have the same ring but with a new meaning behind it. This resulted in an anti-capitalism statement about how large corporations don’t look to satisfy customers but only look at what profits them.
The inspiration for this image came from looking into Barbara Krugers work with old advertisements and making them her own personal message.
Appropriation 3
Here is my third and final piece of appropriation for this project. Here I have a group of soldiers on horse back riding off into battle. I have added the text “Our Soldier’s Plights” as a way of making the audience think about what our soldiers have to go through. This image was originally for the Lloyds 2015, 250 commemoration video of their logo’s horse going through dramatic events in history to show their own sense of solidarity. I tooks a screenshot of these soldiers and simply changed the meaning to fit the purpose I wanted the audience to think about instead.
What inspired me to take a satirical look into this form of appropriation is the images such as Barbara Kruger’s 1987 piece, “We Don’t Need Another hero” in which she took an image from advertisement, cropped it and added new text to give it a new meaning.
Heisler, Y. (2015) Meet the man who steals your Instagram photos and sells them for $90,000. Unknown: BGR. Available from http://bgr.com/2015/05/26/instagram-prints-photos-richard-prince-art/. [Accessed 03 December 2015].
Bailey, J. (2015) Why So Many Photographers Hate Richard Prince. Unknown: plagiarismtoday. Available from https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2015/05/21/why-so-many-photographers-hate-richard-prince/ [Accessed 03 December 2015]