Sarah Charlesworth b. 1947, East Orange, New Jersey Throughout the 1980s, Sarah Charlesworth was identified with artists such as Barbara Kruger, Sherrie Levine, Richard Prince, Cindy Sherman, and Laurie Simmons, whose deconstructive analyses of cultural signs signaled the advent of postmodern photography. Charlesworth was deeply influenced by the critique of representation variously articulated by Conceptual art and the theories of subjectivity that increasingly reshaped that legacy. A 1969 graduate of Barnard College, she founded The Fox magazine with Joseph Kosuth in 1974 and contributed to the pioneering feminist art publication Heresies. In 1977, Charlesworth began the photo-based serial Modern History, for which she photocopied the front pages of newspapers and blocked out all the text, leaving only the masthead, photographs, and layout. This abstracted sequence of images reframed the news, questioning its construction of information. Trial by Fire, 1993 Laminated Cibachrome, edition 4/6, 36 x 28 inches (91.4 x 71.1 cm) In 1992, Charlesworth turned away from the strategy of appropriation to create her own photographs. This Cibachrome picture is drawn from the series Natural Magic (1992–94), which uses photography as medium and subject to explore the image's much vaunted transparency to the real. Suspended in the lower center of an oval black ground, two white gloves spontaneously emit flames, as if performing a magic trick. This picture likens photography to a form of charlatanry and conjures the artifice that has always surrounded the medium—from the mysterious chemistry associated with its nineteenth-century beginnings to the mass media simulations of its twentieth-century incarnations. —Melanie Mariño