Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565

Spiral Galaxy MGC 4565 is part of In-Photography, a series that Sarah Charlesworth created in response to the critic Susan Sontag's influential book On Photography (1977). Sontag, in the artist's estimation, wrote from a standpoint outside photography, without engaging the material as well as the representational histories encoded in photographic technologies. Here Charlesworth appropriated a photograph from a scientific magazine and tore it into pieces to emphasize the scale and substance of her source image. She then photographed the collage greatly enlarged, as if to suggest its own dispersal into outer space. Using torn fragments, Charlesworth literalized the big bang theory, while at the same time thoroughly confusing a conventional sense of scale: the "original" image is rendered enormous, while what it portrays remains infinitely smaller than its cosmic subject.