The Pictures Generation of the 1970s ushered in a new era of photography, one that helped catapult its prominence within the contemporary art world, as artists took up the camera to explore the intersection between identity, iconography, and ideology in American culture. Half a century later, digital technology has democratized the production and proliferation of images, creating a veritable deluge of visual effluvia. Surrounded by screens big and small, we are constantly reading and reacting to images of all types, subtly and substantially reshaping our perceptions of ourselves and modern life.
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In her 2019 book, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power, author Shoshana Zuboff introduces the term “glass life” to describe the ways in which data-driven technology operates, insidiously infiltrating itself through convenience while simultaneously eroding significant social bonds and boundaries including privacy, intimacy, and self-determination. “The greatest danger is that we come to feel at home in glass life or in the prospect of hiding from it,” Zuboff warns. “Both alternatives rob us of the life-sustaining inwardness, born in sanctuary, that finally distinguishes us from the machines.”
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Recognizing the crux of her work within this idea, Canada-born, New York based artist Sara Cwynar adopts this idea as the title of her new monograph, Sara Cwynar: Glass Life (Aperture), which brings together the artist’s multilayered portraits and stills from her films Soft Film (2016), Rose Gold (2017), and Red Film (2018). A kaleidoscopic examination of contemporary life that explores subjective notions of beauty, the fetishization of consumerism, and the archives that have emerged around these ideas, Glass Life deftly deconstructs the ways images relentlessly reshape perception in ways subtle and overt, becoming as pervasive and wily as words themselves.
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