George Eastman Museum

Throughout his career as both a photographer and as a professor of Art History, Carl Chiarenza has argued that pictures come from other pictures. By this he means that we are influenced by all of the pictures we’ve seen before and—whether consciously or unconsciously—we use them as models when we create pictures of our own. Chiarenza elaborates on this idea in a 2008 interview with LensWork editor Brooks Jensen: The whole idea of pictures coming from pictures—is in my career both as a photographer and historian—has always been central to my thinking about picture-making, and photography in particular. And more my work more particularly. In the past when I taught for some 30 years, I would start every class—no matter what the period or theme was, whether it was Renaissance art or medieval art, twentieth century art or photography—the first class would always involve cave pictures and we would have this discuss that we don’t know where those pictures came from. There are a lot of theories about it, but obvious