Lucas Blalock uses a combination of analog and digital photography to explore the way images of objects seduce us. He arranges still lifes in his studio and uses seamless colored backdrop paper, textured fabrics, mirrors, and professional lighting to photograph these setups with 4×5-inch film that he scans into the computer. He then uses Photoshop tools to crop, flip, and blur those images. He does not try to hide his maneuvers; instead he exposes them so the viewer can recognize and understand his visual manipulation.

In the images that comprise Kim Schoen’s Spread, books are precisely styled and staged in rotating positions so that their spines are often visible. The titles describe the books’ content, but the spines have a somewhat generic appearance, as they are missing the authors’ names and publishers’ marks. Five books are turned around to show empty interiors, revealing that these are hollow objects masquerading as literary tomes; their real purpose is to adorn bookcases being sold in furniture stores and advertisements.

DIS is an internet-centric art collective founded in New York in 2010. It began as the online periodical DIS Magazine, a hybrid lifestyle/fashion/art magazine organized around themes of labor, tweens, art school, stock, privacy, and disaster. In 2013, DIS established a stock-image library that manipulates the banal, frictionless, and saccharine styles of stock photography.

Victoria Fu investigates the disparity between the digital and physical worlds by combining analog images of her own making with digital images she acquires from stock photography sites.

The title of Roe Ethridge’s 2014 still-life photograph, Celine Bracelet for “Gentlewoman,” peels back the curtain, letting the viewer know that this is a magazine advertisement for a luxury brand. The photograph occupies two worlds: art and advertising. Similarly, the content of the photograph ranges from real to fake. A marble pear reverberates against the marble veneer backdrop and anchors the still life, which is dominated by grapes made of rubber with plastic leaves—materials often used in commercial food photography because they can withstand the hot lights of a set.

Christmas Gifts was the opening image of an editorial spread on gift giving published in the 1936 December issue of House Beautiful. In the early twentieth century, the type of modernist photography aesthetic practiced by Paul Outerbridge Jr.—which emphasized patterning and a tight crop—was actively promoted by magazine editors, including Frank Crowninshield, editor of Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936. The public’s positive response to these high-style, artistic images served to popularize the trend.

Inspired by semiotics, psychoanalysis, and film studies, Victor Burgin combines found advertisements with his own writing to examine the difference between implicit and explicit meaning. In US77 he appropriates the look and language of advertising, fusing his own social documentary-style photographs with extended prose in the form of captions presented as oversized posters adhered directly to the wall.

Urs Fischer’s Fritz Lang/Shorty is a precise grouping of mirror boxes depicting two oversized ducklings and two empty shopping carts; the work is seamlessly manufactured without a trace of the artist’s hand. It is slick, shiny, and cute—granting it ultimate commodity appeal. The reflections of the four mirror boxes incorporate the surrounding gallery space, and viewers are compressed into the visual space of the shopping carts. Everything is consumable, ready to be pushed to the cash register, purchased, and taken home.

In Autopoetics and Wire, Carter Mull brings together a montage of found images that reflect contemporary American culture and art. These include four reproductions of the poster promoting the 2000 movie Pollock, about Abstract Expressionist artist Jackson Pollock. Although the background is bleached out in these negative versions, Ed Harris as Pollock is shown in front of one of his paintings while he works on another set up on the floor.

Barbara Kruger uses bold text, often in combination with highly graphic images, to create open-ended messages with social and political implications. Her use of “you” addresses the viewer directly, while her inclusion of the pronouns “I” and “we” suggests a dialogue with an unspecified authority. Composed of three panels, Untitled (You substantiate our horror) is a unique oversized gelatin silver print encased in a red frame. This work defied the norms of 1980s art photography, which largely consisted of intimate black-and-white images matted and framed in black.