Photo By Gail

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the early 1990s for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. For more than four decades, she has mined magazines and archives for photographs and texts, then reconfigured these materials to question their objectivity and grant them new meanings.

In True Value (2015) Simpson bases the figures on her collage that uses an editorial photograph from Jet magazine. The work employs a single and genius gesture – switching the faces of the woman and the wild pet – to imbue  an already unbelievable image with more curious uncertainty. Here, crop marks painted around the heads of the figures reveal the collage origins of the composition and make legible the creative decision that resulted in the unusual scene.

Photographed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art as Part of the Exhibit, Lorna Simpson: Source Notes.