Sarah Charlesworth

In the late 1970s Sarah Charlesworth began to question the role that photographic images play in shaping perception. This critical standpoint, which she shared with others in a loose-knit group of New York–based artists known as the Pictures Generation, marked a shift in artistic focus away from the linguistic emphasis of Conceptualism and the formal reductions of Minimalism associated with art of the 1960s and 1970s. These artists rather began to draw on, appropriate, and manipulate existing visual content, hoping, as Charlesworth expressed it, to “elucidate a common cultural experience and how it is depicted in the mass media.”

Charlesworth’s The Arc of Total Eclipse, February 26, 1979 belongs to her series Modern History, which examines how photographic images function within the editorial practices of newspapers. For this particular work, the artist selected as her subject front-page coverage from locales across the path of a solar eclipse over North America. Charlesworth removed all written language except for the mastheads in her actual-sized re-presentations of these twenty-nine newspapers. Although they represent the same spectacle, the images vary somewhat, as do their size and position, depending on the publications’ photographers and editors and on the relative importance of the unseen articles that shared the page. The result is a visual allegory of how varied media perspectives contribute to an understanding of the world. As Charlesworth remarked: “The eclipse interested me metaphysically, because there wasn’t any single image that was consistent, or even any single point in time represented. Each town along the eclipse path had its own experience of the same event.”