Sarah Charlesworth (American, 1947-2013). Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Sarah E. Charlesworth is one of several artists-including Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons-who use photography to address issues of representation, appropriation, commodification, and the revision of history. Charlesworth's iconography comes from nature, religion, and high and low culture and stimulates associations with philosophy, literature and literary theory, art history, psychoanalysis, gender studies, and personal experience. Her greatest influences were the artists Douglas Huebler, with whom she studied at Barnard College while pursuing a degree in art history, and Joseph Kosuth, whose writings in Art after Philosophy held particular appeal. Charlesworth and Kosuth were close companions throughout most of the 1970s, founding and writing for a short-lived art theory magazine titled The Fox (1975-76). Charlesworth's interest in photography began at Barnard, where she submitted a 50-print study of the Guggenheim Museum in lieu of her senior thesis, despite threats of failure from her advisor. She graduated in 1969 with an honorable mention and for the next seven years worked as a freelance photographer, studying briefly with Lisette Model, who shared Charlesworth's interest in the occult and parapsychology. In 1977, she began a series titled Modern History that examined a series of news photos as a way of discovering their cultural use. Typically, she did not use the camera directly. Her interest in photography is not as a vehicle for presenting a personal vision, but a means to uncover, in her words, the "roots and complex structure" of the photographic language. Since 1983, Charlesworth has concentrated on three major bodies of work: Objects of Desire, Of Myself, and The Academy of Secrets. In 1993, she began Natural Magic, a series for which she rephotographed her own images as part of an extended self-portrait that offers ironic commentary on her own successful reception into the market and history of art. Since 1995, she has moved from iconic collages to large Cibachrome images of still lifes in the mode of photography's earliest images. The work is titled Doubleworld. Charlesworth has spoken on numerous panels with provocative thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard and has taught at New York University (1983-85), Hartford University and Hartford Art School (1994), and the School of the Visual Arts in New York (since 1992). Her awards include fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts (1976, 1980, 1983) and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation (1995), and a New York Creative Artists Public Service Grant (1977). Source: Cleveland Museum

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