The term appropriation in art refers to the “practice of artists using pre-existing objects or images in their art with little transformation of the original”.  A well-known early example is Marcel Duchamp’s ready mades which have had a significant influence on artists throughout modern art, including Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg, and is still widely used today.

Appropriation sits readily within the realms of photography because of the wealth of available material for artists to draw upon.  Old photograph albums, books, magazines, postcards and the like connect us to history, our ancestry, politics and the  entire world.  In the modern era the proliferation of images available via the internet provides a vast amount of raw material for the artist.

For his series A Series of Unfortunate Events Michael Wolf took images from Google Street View of accidents, violence and other ‘unfortunate’ incidents, all captured randomly by the Google car.  Wolf in effect acts as curator, sifting through many thousands of images to create a discrete collection with a common theme.  As with all appropriation, by pulling the images together in this way he creates a new discourse; in this case they are no longer by-products of a mapping app but have become objects for discussion in their own right.

It is this creation of a new context which the artist is adding to the original object and because of this I think appropriation is a valid and appropriate method of creating art.

References

http://www.lensculture.com/articles/michael-wolf-a-series-of-unfortunate-events [Accessed 20th February 2020]

photomichaelwolf.com [Accessed 20 February 2020]