Mishka Henner: Less Américains

Inspired by Robert Rauschenberg’s audacious erasure of a Willem de Kooning drawing in 1953, Henner appropriated the 83 images from Robert Frank's iconic book The Americans (first published in 1958 by Robert Delpire in France as Les Américains) and digitally erased much of the original content, leaving blank areas where once there were faces, buildings, and landscapes. The work becomes a contemporary composite belonging to our digital age; a kind of new portrait of American society emerges, conjuring up notions of missing data and lost image files, asking the psychological question of how we remember these famous images and how our relationship to them and to the medium of photography today differs from that of the past.

“…so I plunged into those mysterious details, scalpel in hand, searching for my own signs and symbols in the smooth, paper thin surface of America.” – Mishka Henner, 2013