Untimely Images, Fallen Figures: Sarah Charlesworth at the End of Modern History

Abstract

Abstract Sarah Charlesworth’s Stills (1980), a series of monumentally enlarged newspaper photographs depicting people plummeting from buildings, is commonly framed as a self-reflexive inquiry into the experience of time and mortality occasioned by photography. Based on archival research into Charlesworth’s journalistic source material for Stills and its antecedent, Modern History, this article advances an alternative reading of the works and their memorial-like format in terms of more collective experiences of temporality and history. These concerns, I argue, link Charlesworth’s project to a longer Pop art tradition, complicating established art historical accounts of the so-called Pictures Generation and its political imagination.