IMAGE DETAILS

Galerie La Patinoire Royale Bach

Alfredo Jaar (Chili, Santiago 1956)
Life Magazine, 19 April 1968
1995
Three lightboxes, analog C-print on Duratrans
183 x 360 cm (entire dimension)
183 x 120 cm (one lightbox)
Unique piece

Life Magazine, 19 April 1968 (1995) by Alfredo Jaar is one of the Chilean artist’s iconic lightbox works in which he pointillistically engages an image from the public archive, intervening with his signature cutting precision to highlight social inequities and the politics of image making.

The source image for this work is a documentary photograph of Martin Luther King’s funeral printed in 1968 in Life Magazine, the magazine of reference for a generation of Americans. In the image, a horse drawn casket is surrounded by supporters, and behind, a crowd fills the boulevard, stretching into the vanishing point beyond. It is a powerful representation of the late civil rights leader’s influence.

The source photograph is presented large scale on the left third of the lightbox. In the center, the image is whited over, and in the place of faces in the crowd are black dots, massing and overflowing the street. In the rightmost part of the triptych, the source image is similarly whited out, but this time only a smattering of red dots appear — a handful scattered across the crowd.

The artist placed black dots on the faces of African Americans. The red dots highlight White attendees.

Created while Jaar was researching the Life archives for another iconic lightbox work, Searching for Africa in Life (1996), in which the artist reprints every cover of the magazine, highlighting through the punctum of the title the glaring absence of adequate representation of the continent, Life Magazine, 19 April 1968 (1995) similarly makes manifest a glaring absence. Through the precision of the artist’s intervention, and rendered in the artist’s signature clean lines, a singular gesture evokes the imbroglia of lingering racism and inequality in contemporary society.