Sarah Charlesworth

Over the course of a 40-year career, Conceptual artist and photographer Sarah Charlesworth deconstructed the conventions of photography and gave emphasis to the medium's importance in mediating our perception of the world. Part of a group of artists working in New York in the 1980s that included Jack Goldstein, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman and Laurie Simmons, Charlesworth straddled 1970s Conceptual art and the Pictures Generation, creating work that probed the visual language of mass media and illuminated the impact of ubiquitous imagery on our everyday lives.

This fully illustrated catalogue accompanying Charlesworth's first major survey in New York features series such as Stills (1980), a group of 14 large-scale works rephotographed from press images that depict people falling or jumping off buildings; Modern History (1977-79), which pioneered photographic appropriation; the alluring Objects of Desire (1983-88) and Renaissance Paintings (1991), which continued Charlesworth's trenchant approach to mining the language of photography; Doubleworld (1995), which probes the fetishism of vision in pre-modernist art and marks Charlesworth's transition to a more active role behind the camera; and her final series, Available Light (2012).

Sarah Charlesworth was born in 1947 in East Orange, New Jersey, and received a BA from Barnard College in 1969. She was the subject of a 1997 retrospective organized by SITE Santa Fe. Charlesworth taught photography for many years at the School of the Visual Arts, New York; the Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and Princeton University, New Jersey. She died in 2013 in Falls Village, Connecticut.