Sanja Iveković was a pioneering figure within the Yugoslavian feminist movement of the 1970s. Her work in photomontage, video, and performance explores the role of women in society, using her own life and history as source material. Iveković’s series GEN XX comprises six black-and-white photographs of women, all but one appropriated from advertisements, and replaces the text, slogans, and product references with the names of anti-fascist, female resistance fighters from Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia.

In the mid-1970s Mitchell Syrop began to combine image and text to make short films and photographs, often in series or grids. In these works he also capitalized on neutral, open-ended advertising slogans, colloquial expressions, everyday clichés, and Bible references, which he formatted according to American typographic conventions. When considered together, the phrases “Watch It” and “Think It” take on an overbearing tone.

Silvia Kolbowski attributes her ongoing interest in language to her uncompromising immersion in English at age six after she moved with her family from Buenos Aires to New York. Her work draws on theory—including feminism and psychoanalysis—as well as appropriation and the tradition of overtly political British photo-text work. Between 1982 and 1984 Kolbowski created eight multi-image artworks for her series Model Pleasure. In them, she interspersed text with images to suggest that every component, whether image or text, should be read.

Cofounded by Kalle Lasn and Bill Schmalz in Vancouver in 1989, Adbusters pioneered the phenomenon of “culture jamming,” in which the techniques of conventional print advertising are used to critique, subvert, and challenge the hegemony of large corporations. It features often-disturbing spoof ads alongside left-leaning articles on a wide range of political and social issues—including animal rights, climate change, and nuclear proliferation—and regularly solicits submissions and ideas from its readers.

In Hank Willis Thomas’s series Fair Warning, he has extracted figures from cigarette advertisements and consolidated them on single pages, sometimes in a playful arc or pyramid. Glamorous African American women, dressed in evening gowns and silky pantsuits, lock eyes with the viewer while smiling happily and kicking up their heels in pleasure. Thomas demonstrates how smoking is made to appear sophisticated and stylish in order to coerce members of the Black community into adopting a deadly habit.

A radical photographer who is said to have never owned a camera, Robert Heinecken reworked found imagery from advertising, popular culture, and pornography in order to critique the strategies of print and broadcast media. His 1989 portfolio Recto/Verso includes twelve sumptuously glossy prints featuring images of women advertising makeup, jewelry, jeans, and bathing suits. Each print records light passing through a single magazine page so that the pictures on the front (recto) and back (verso) overlap to make a single image.

To make this work, Sherrie Levine cut out President Washington’s silhouette from a page of a woman’s fashion magazine. This profile, originally designed by sculptor John Flanagan, appeared on the 1932 quarter to commemorate the bicentennial of Washington’s birth. By appropriating this image from U.S. currency and recreating it using a fashion editorial, Levine explores the way advertisers commodify women to sell goods and lifestyles.

Drawing from high-end European fashion magazines, Vikky Alexander’s early experiments with rephotography are key examples of 1980s appropriation. Unlike Richard Prince, whose work often examines tropes of masculinity, Alexander is interested in how women view other women. The source for St. Sebastian is an image of a reclining female model—glistening with perspiration and wearing a strapless black bathing suit—that Alexander photographed from a fashion magazine using a 35mm camera and a simple copy stand.

In the 1970s Richard Prince worked for Time Inc., clipping magazine articles for the writers’ archive. Enthralled with the advertisements for luxury goods such as watches, liquor, purses, and cigarettes, he began to rephotograph them with his own camera, distancing them from their original purposes and recasting them as “high art.” Prince’s pioneering use of appropriated images has made him the artist most associated with the Pictures Generation, a group of American artists interested in originality, authorship, and the construction of images.

This is a recording of a live performance Martha Rosler did for public-access television in 1982. She sits at a short table that holds two mirrors and makeup, with the December 1982 issue of Vogue in her lap. As she flips through the pages, she runs her fingers across images, circling the models and asking them questions. Her critique shifts from how the magazine is meant to be consumed by the reader to details of its production, such as circulation numbers, international editions, and advertising prices.