Penelope Umbrico is another artist I've discovered since moving to Albuquerque. Photography becomes the subject itself in her work. She employs traditional photographic techniques and methods of appropriation, extraction, multiple production, and intervention to explore how we, as a culture, make and use images.
The first image is called "Suns (From Sunsets) from Flickr, 2006-ongoing. The piece is made by searching sunset on flickr, cropping the sunset and then each photograph uploaded to Kodak and 6x4 machine prints are made. The installation grows each time it's put on display according to the amount of hits she got when searching sunsets. The piece began with 2,303,057 suns from flickr in 2007 and by 2011, it was at 8,730,221 suns.
The second image is similar to the first but the suns were taken from stock photography websites and each photograph had a copyright watermark on it. Her intention for this work was to point out the absurdity of trying to "own" the image of the sun.
I think her work speaks a lot about today's attitude towards photography. Everyone is taking photographs and posting them online and it's at a point where it's like there's too much to look at. I think the act of appropriation is a good way of demonstrating those ideas.
http://www.penelopeumbrico.net/index.html
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