Clunie Reid

Why Use Existing Photographs? — Because the Object of Critique Is the Image Itself

Based in London, Reid has worked across photography, collage, video, digital media, and text. Her official biography describes a body of work spanning printed and digital images and shows her repeated use of material taken from advertising and published media in different forms^*1 A BOMB interview presents her as an artist who borrows images from advertising, publishing, television, and the internet and cuts, writes over, and pastes into them to address messages embedded in beauty, sexuality, and identity^*23She uses already circulating photographs instead of making new nudes or advertising-style images because her subject is not the body in isolation. It is the advertising, pornography, and magazine photography through which bodies have been taught to be seen. An ICA exhibition in 2008 specifically documented her process of collecting images from tabloids, magazines, and the internet, then copying, altering, enlarging, and repeating them in large wall collages^*5By retaining the source image within the work, Reid places the object of critique and her own intervention in direct comparison on the same surface.

From Advertising’s Suggestion to Explicit Online Self-Representation

ICA’s Nought to Sixty situated Reid as an artist working with found images across printed and digital environments^*4 She later participated in the New Museum exhibition Free, which addressed how the internet was changing the circulation of information and interpersonal relations^*24 In BOMB, Reid specifically observed that a vulgarity once couched in suggestion within advertising had become explicit in the language and imagery of online self-presentation and greeting cards^*23Her concern is therefore more specific than the general claim that there are simply too many images. She follows the shift by which the language of commercial advertising, once delivered one-way from corporations to audiences, is repeated by individuals as a language for describing themselves and others.

Advertising, Pornography, and Celebrity Images — Making Their Implications Explicit

Reid works with advertising, magazines, television, pornography, celebrity photography, and other images in which the value of the body has already been edited and coded. In an artist statement preserved by Saatchi Gallery, she identifies the relationship between images of bodies and objects in advertising and the construction of our view of the world as a central concern^*9 In BOMB, she describes her intervention as a way to “vulgarize” existing images. In Window “Smoke” Square, deliberately redundant labels are attached to elements within the image, making the act of looking conspicuous^*23 Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples likewise fixes printed imagery, handwritten marks, text, and rephotography onto a single photographic surface^*10By writing the commands and sexual implications of the source image in a more explicit form, Reid brings to the surface what the image had treated as self-evident.

Abandoning the Punk/DIY Look

Reid’s lines, tape, and stickers leave the joins of the collage visible, preserving the speed and roughness of the work. The Guardian noted that because the pieces are made quickly and mistakes are left in place, their surfaces appear as unstable as the media world they depict^*15 Studio Voltaire similarly describes her work through punk, DIY, and bricolage, with celebrity, pornography, fashion, cartoons, and art theory brought together on the same surface^*11 Yet in 2012 Reid explicitly stated that the resemblance to punk and DIY had become easy to read as a stylistic reference, and that détournement had limits when it could no longer generate ambiguity or contradiction^*23Her change of method in 2012 makes clear that she did not equate a rough appearance with critical force. Once graffiti-like interventions on found imagery became easily recognizable as a “Clunie Reid style,” the method risked making the work predictable before it unsettled the advertising image. She chose to shift toward video and writing rather than preserve her best-known visual signature.

Rephotography — Turning the Critical Intervention into a Reproducible Image

In Take No Photographs, Leave Only Ripples, Reid intervenes directly in found photographs, then rephotographs and reprints them. UAL Research Online records the project as a major research output and describes a process in which photography and handwork are combined over several stages^*6 The university’s research-output listings place photographs, video, and publications from this period together as works concerned with the reproduction of images^*8 Fotomuseum Winterthur’s discussion of the work in its collection also indicates that it was understood in relation to photographic reproduction, not simply as paper collage^*18Rephotography keeps the handwritten lines, tape, and stickers from remaining merely annotations added on top of a magazine photograph. Once photographed again, source image and intervention are fixed onto the same plane and become equally reproducible as one image. The critical mark itself can now circulate in the same way as the advertising photograph it addresses, preventing the work from settling into the position of judging advertising from the outside.

Your Higher Plane Awaits — Reflecting the Viewer in a Silver Surface

Your Higher Plane Awaits uses silver, reflective supports and glossy surfaces. UAL records the work as one of Reid’s research outputs and documents its combination of photographs, text, and reflective material^*7 Images from Galerie Reinhard Hauff likewise show silver and black surfaces, handwriting, and photographic fragments combined on the same plane, with reflected light changing according to the viewer’s position^*19As a result, light from the gallery and the viewer’s own body are reflected onto the same support as advertising and bodily imagery. The material reflection disrupts any position in which the viewer remains outside the work while judging media images at a distance. A photography-now record specifies the support of Your Higher Plane Awaits as “Digitaler Druck auf Silver MET”; the silver reflective surface is an actual material component of the work^*21.

Faker Drinker Soldier Heiress — Making Images and Words Collide across the Page Sequence

Published by Book Works, Faker Drinker Soldier Heiress is a sixty-four-page artist book made from advertising, internet and magazine imagery, along with Reid’s own photographs and drawings. The publisher describes images, jokes, text, and drawings layered over blacked-out and mirrored pages^*12 Its specifications—offset printing, two spot colors, and full UV varnish—transfer the gloss and reflection of Reid’s wall works to the pages of a book. Book Works’ artist page also shows that publication has remained an ongoing medium in her work alongside exhibitions^*13The specific shift in this book is the conversion of operations previously carried out on large reflective prints into a sixty-four-page object that unfolds through the sequence of turning pages.

Toward Video and Language — Digitizing Still Images and Reediting Them in Time

Reid’s work expanded from still photography into online video and edited text. Free, preserved by Rhizome, survives as a work built from networked imagery and language^*17 The New Museum exhibition Free was itself organized around the ways the web was altering access to information, artistic production, and interpersonal relationships^*24 In BOMB, Reid explained that she had begun bringing digital versions of still images into video and combining them with more extreme images and text, treating video as another way of presenting images that are no longer still^*23The earlier process of drawing over paper photographs and rephotographing them becomes, in video, a process of rearranging digitized still images along a timeline. A 2013 Frieze review of In Pursuit of the Liquid describes four screens repeating kittens and images of women while pink text scrolls over them, reediting phrases taken from porn pop-ups and chat rooms^*16.

Beyond Quotation — What Reid Takes from the Pictures Generation Is Self-Implication

Reid can be related to appropriation after Cindy Sherman, Barbara Kruger, and Richard Prince, but in BOMB she emphasized something other than quotation as a technique. What drew her to the Pictures Generation was the move from simple negation toward a criticism that acknowledges the critic’s own implication in the system being criticized^*23 Collage exhibitions at The Photographers’ Gallery and FOTOHOF’s Karaoke have situated her within a broader history of cutting, rearranging, and reenacting existing images^*14For Reid, the aim is not to point at advertising photographs from outside and expose them as false. Her critique begins from the recognition that she too has learned meaning through the same advertising, pornography, and online imagery; she writes into those images and recirculates them. Her participation in FOTOHOF’s Karaoke: Bildformen des Zitats also placed the work within an international exhibition context devoted to quotation and reenactment of existing images^*20.

From Rough Collage to Video and Text — Refusing a Fixed Method

Reid’s exhibition history includes ICA, Tate Britain, the New Museum, and Fotomuseum Winterthur, where her work has been presented across photography, video, and installation^*2 Tate Britain’s Art Now likewise presented her alongside James Richards as an artist working with photographic collage and media imagery^*22 Institutional recognition did not lead Reid to preserve the appearance of her earlier work. In the 2012 BOMB interview she acknowledged that punk/DIY references and détournement no longer felt sufficiently specific and described a concrete shift toward more extreme imagery, video, and writing^*23Once the early appearance of a “defaced photograph” lost its specificity, Reid let go of that appearance itself. This decision gives a concrete reason for her move into video and writing. Her official website similarly brings photographs, videos, publications, and exhibition history together as one body of work, confirming a practice that has not remained tied to a single medium^*3.