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By the end of the 1970s, artists’ trust in the photograph had withered to lifelessness. Gillian Brown took on a more specific analysis of the workings of photography itself, assembling a catalogue of the medium’s limitations and deceptions.

The untitled work presented here consists of two photographs of the same artist-constructed set, made from identical vantage points. The sole difference between the two is a result of the photographic materials used: the film and paper Brown employed for the top picture produced a black and white image; those used to make the bottom one gave her a color photograph, and uncover her deception.

As a UCLA graduate student in the late 1970s Brown was both product and catalyst of an attitude described by James Hugunin as an approach to thought and aesthetics which

is by its very structure self-conscious, self-reflexive. It is an attempt to think about a given object on one level, and as one does so, to observe at the same time one’s own thought processes. Applied to photography, and as taught by Robert Heinecken, the result of such an approach is to be aware of one’s “presence” within the photograph as well as how one is “positioning” the potential viewers of the work… The result is often a work of meta-photography, photography-about-photography, that plays with the syntax of photographic rhetoric, that comments upon the fictional, constructed nature of what the average viewer sees as an accurate rendition of things.¹

1. James R. Hugunin, “Uni/di/versity of California, Los Angeles,” in Celebrating Two Decades in Photography: Recent Work by UCLA/MFA Recipients (Los Angeles: Grunwald Center for the Graphic Arts, University of California, Los Angeles, 1985), 15-16. ↩︎