Objects of Desire: Photography and the Language of Advertising traces the artistic manipulation of advertising, the most powerful, mainstream visual language. Since the 1970s, creative innovations led to dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression, as photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life, and later to appropriate the command these images have over the viewer/consumer. By exploiting advertising’s visual vocabulary and adopting its sites and formats, and through re-photography, appropriation, and simulation, artists create a shared photographic language that puts the onus on the viewer to determine what exactly these pictures are asking of us.

Participating artists included Adbusters, Lucas Blalock, Victor Burgin, Jo Ann Callis, Sarah Charlesworth, Sara Cwynar, Victoria Fu, Sanja Iveković, Elad Lassry, Roe Ethridge, Robert Heinecken, Barbara Kruger, Carter Mull, Pat O’Neill, Kim Schoen, Sandy Skoglund, Mitchell Syrop, and Hank Willis Thomas, among others.