The title of this project pays tribute to Rene Magritte and his famous painting Treachery of Images, a banal rendition of a pipe with the inscription Ceci n’est pas une pipe (This is Not a Pipe). Magritte’s piece asks the viewer to contemplate a paradox: While looking at what plainly is a (picture of a) pipe, the observer is reminded that the painted image is not, in fact, a pipe.
At first glance, it might seem that the sixteen pictures of the White House in this series—one for each block of the coveted 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue address—are what they appear: photos of the White House. In their repetition and similarity, they pay homage to the typologies of industrial structures photographed by Bernd and Hilla Becher. However, after looking a little more closely, the viewer realizes that these are, in fact, “photos of photos” of the White House.
When Richard Prince created his Marlboro Man project, he took photos from cigarette ads, removed the accompanying text, and thus appropriated images that play on the familiarity of omnipresent ads, using the beauty and romance of the American West. The White House project works almost oppositely. Instead of removing information, telltale signs that give clues to these photos’ origins are “added.” These hints serve to paraphrase Magritte’s inscription—to inform the viewer, while looking at photos of what seem to be the White House, that This Is Not the White House, and that these images are an approximation or substitute for the White House.
For those who can enjoy the seemingly impossible endeavor of holding two opposing ideas at the same time, these photos remind us to question what we are looking at. And to appreciate the irony of it, not unlike the impossibility of solving a zen koan.