About this artwork
Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565 is part of In-Photography, a series that Sarah Charlesworth created in response to the critic Susan Sontag’s influential book On Photography (1977). Sontag, in the artist’s estimation, wrote from a standpoint outside photography, without engaging the material as well as the representational histories encoded in photographic technologies. Here Charlesworth appropriated a photograph from a scientific magazine and tore it into pieces to emphasize the scale and substance of her source image. She then photographed the collage greatly enlarged, as if to suggest its own dispersal into outer space. Using torn fragments, Charlesworth literalized the big bang theory, while at the same time thoroughly confusing a conventional sense of scale: the “original” image is rendered enormous, while what it portrays remains infinitely smaller than its cosmic subject.
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Status
- Currently Off View
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Department
- Photography and Media
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Artist
- Sarah Charlesworth
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Title
- Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565
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Place
- United States (Artist's nationality:)
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Date
- Made 1981
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Medium
- Gelatin silver print
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Edition
- 1 of 3
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Dimensions
- 119.5 × 165.5 cm (47 1/16 × 65 3/16 in.)
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Credit Line
- Photography Associates Fund
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Reference Number
- 2012.63
Extended information about this artwork
Object information is a work in progress and may be updated as new research findings emerge. To help improve this record, please email . Information about image downloads and licensing is available here.
