Use of Vintage Imagery
Works that borrow old photographs, prints, advertisements and illustrations, reusing the look of past eras.
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About
Vintage imagery brings the texture of another time into a new work: faded studio portraits, Victorian engravings, mid-century magazine advertisements, old maps and postcards. Artists use it for nostalgia, for irony or to expose attitudes the original images took for granted.
Max Ernst's collage novel Une semaine de bonté (1934) cut up 19th-century engravings from popular fiction and catalogues into dreamlike scenes, and Pop artists later mined commercial illustration. More recent artists have turned archival images towards history and memory. Carrie Mae Weems's From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1995–96) reframes 19th-century photographs of enslaved people with new text, and Maurizio Anzeri embroiders coloured thread over found vintage portrait photographs. Hannah Höch's photomontages of the 1920s, cut from the magazines of her day, now read as vintage themselves. Look for period printing, aged paper and the tension between the old image and its new frame.
