Opening the book…
By the late 1960s and 1970s, one of the most radical things artists could do with photography was stop pretending that every meaningful image had to begin from scratch. Instead of celebrating originality as the highest artistic virtue, they began to ask harder questions: What if the modern image world is already crowded with pictures? What if authorship is less about inventing something pure and untouched than about selecting, reframing, repeating, quoting, and exposing what images already do in public life? Appropriation grows out of that pressure. Tate defines appropriation as the use of pre-existing objects or images with little transformation, and that definition is useful here because it gets right to the point: the borrowed image is not a shortcut. It is the argument.¹ (Tate)
This matters because appropriation and rephotography were not only stylistic strategies. They were also attacks on some of modernism’s favorite myths: originality, authorship, authenticity, and artistic genius. Earlier traditions had often treated the image as the expression of an individual maker’s unique vision. But once artists began working directly with magazine pages, advertisements, newspapers, archives, and already-circulating photographs, the photograph stopped looking like a private revelation and started looking like part of a larger image economy. In that sense, photography turned inward. It began critiquing not just the world “out there,” but its own systems of production, reproduction, and authority.² (The Museum of Modern Art)
Robert Heinecken is especially important here because he was exploring these issues before appropriation became one of the best-known signatures of postmodern art in the 1980s. MoMA’s materials on Are You Rea describe the series as photograms made directly from magazine pages, often combining the front and back of a single page into one image. In the museum’s audio commentary, curator Eva Respini explains that Heinecken exposed magazine pages onto photographic paper so that both sides could register simultaneously—essentially collapsing media surfaces into one unstable, layered image.³ That process matters because there is no camera lens mediating the result in the usual way. The work is photographic, but it is also already a critique of photography’s claim to transparency. It takes mass-media images and turns them into something stranger, denser, and less trustworthy. (The Museum of Modern Art)
Robert Heinecken, Are You Rea #1, 1964–68.
Heinecken’s importance also lies in what he reveals about the modern image environment. MoMA’s 2013 retrospective materials describe Are You Rea as “representative of a culture that was increasingly commercialized, technologically mediated, and suspicious of established truths,” adding that the series was built from more than 2,000 magazine pages drawn from publications such as Life, Time, and Woman’s Day.⁴ That is exactly why he belongs here. His work does not merely borrow images for visual cleverness. It shows that media imagery is already layered with desire, salesmanship, ideology, and coded assumptions. The resulting photograph is less a window than a collision: ad against article, surface against surface, seduction against information. The photograph becomes a quotation machine, and quotation becomes critique. (The Museum of Modern Art)
If Heinecken shows appropriation operating through the reuse of mass-media images, Cildo Meireles shows how related questions of authorship and image circulation can move even further into systems of everyday exchange. His Insertions into Ideological Circuits projects—whether through banknotes or Coca-Cola bottles—do not function as appropriation in exactly the same sense as rephotography, but they are absolutely central to the chapter because they shift attention from the singular image to the ideological circuit through which meaning travels. MoMA’s collection pages identify Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project as printed labels applied to commercial glass bottles and list Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Banknote Project as a 1970 work that reentered currency into circulation after intervention.⁵ The key move is not to make a precious art object that stands outside the system. It is to enter an existing system and make it speak differently. (The Museum of Modern Art)
Cildo Meireles, Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project, 1970.
That move is crucial because it widens the meaning of appropriation. The photograph as quotation is not only about reusing a prior image; it is also about reusing a format, a channel, a delivery system, or a public language. In Meireles’s case, the “image” cannot be separated from circulation. The work lives by moving through the very commercial and political systems it interrupts. MoMA’s post essays on global conceptualism and on Meireles’s ideological circuits stress that conceptual practices in Latin America often carried sharper sociopolitical stakes than the cooler institutional critiques associated with some North Atlantic contexts.⁶ That warning is useful. It keeps us from flattening appropriation into a single art-world trick. In one place, reuse might expose the seductions of advertising. In another, it might become coded dissent under dictatorship. (post)
Seen together, Heinecken and Meireles help clarify what appropriation and rephotography do in the history of photography. They challenge the fantasy of the untouched original. They undermine the heroic image of the solitary genius. They reveal that photographs already arrive inside networks of reproduction, commerce, ideology, and memory. And they show that quotation is not necessarily secondhand or derivative. Sometimes quotation is the sharpest way to think. By borrowing, recirculating, and reframing existing imagery and systems, artists of this period made photography critique itself—its truth claims, its distribution networks, and its role in manufacturing modern experience.⁷ (Tate)
You can also feel the ground being prepared for the next stage of photographic history. Once artists begin treating images as already mediated, already coded, and already available for reuse, the path opens directly toward later postmodern strategies. But in the 1960s and 1970s, the key breakthrough is already here: photography no longer has to pretend to be innocent in order to matter. It can quote, steal, reroute, and expose—and in doing so, tell the truth about images in a different way.⁸ (The Museum of Modern Art)
Footnotes
- “Appropriation.” Tate, n.d., www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/appropriation. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (Tate)
- “Authenticity.” Tate, n.d., www.tate.org.uk/art/art-terms/a/authenticity. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
Marcoci, Roxana. Robert Heinecken: Object Matter. The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Press preview PDF. (Tate) - “Robert Heinecken. Are You Rea #1. 1964–68.” The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/48167. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
“Robert Heinecken. Are You Rea #1. 1964–68.” MoMA Audio: Robert Heinecken: Object Matter, The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/audio/playlist/177/2344. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art) - “The Museum of Modern Art Presents a Retrospective of Robert Heinecken.” The Museum of Modern Art press release, 23 Mar. 2013, assets.moma.org/documents/moma_press-release_386896.pdf. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art)
- Meireles, Cildo. Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Coca-Cola Project (Inserções em Circuitos Ideológicos: Projeto Coca-Cola). 1970. The Museum of Modern Art, www.moma.org/collection/works/293092. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
“Print, Fold, Send.” The Museum of Modern Art, collection gallery text, www.moma.org/calendar/galleries/5154. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
Meireles, Cildo. Insertions into Ideological Circuits: Banknote Project. 1970. The Museum of Modern Art, artist/collection pages. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art) - Gilbert, Zanna, and Cildo Meireles. “‘Pop Art Is Poison.’ Cildo Meireles on Ideological Circuits.” post, The Museum of Modern Art, 13 Nov. 2013, post.moma.org/pop-art-is-poison-cildo-meireles-on-ideological-circuits/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026.
“Global Conceptualism: Reflections.” post, The Museum of Modern Art, 29 Apr. 2015, post.moma.org/global-conceptualism-reflections/. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (post) - Marcoci, Roxana. Robert Heinecken: Object Matter. The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Press preview PDF.
“Appropriation.” Tate, n.d. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art) - Marcoci, Roxana. Robert Heinecken: Object Matter. The Museum of Modern Art, 2014. Press preview PDF. Accessed 4 Mar. 2026. (The Museum of Modern Art)
This page titled 14.9: Appropriation and Rephotography was last modified on Wed, 05 Aug 2026 02:40:24 GMT and is shared under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license and was authored, remixed, and/or curated by James William Moore.
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