I kinda like the idea of artists who generate images through the reproduction of other images. The appropriated image may be a film still, a photograph, a drawing; it is often itself already a reproduction. Often I appropriate other photographs in shop windows or advertisements.

Allegory, for me is consistently attracted to the fragmentary, the imperfect, the incomplete---an affinity which finds its most comprehensive expression in the ruin. As an allegorical art photography would represent our desire to fix the transitory, the ephemeral, in a stable and stabilizing image.

In an allegorical structure one text or image is read through another, however fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic their relationship may be----the paradigm for the allegorical work is the palimpsest.

Craig Owens in The Allegorical Impulse: Toward a Theory of Postmodernism in October, Vol. 12. (Spring, 1980), pp. 67-86 says:

Allegorical imagery is appropriated imagery; the allegorist does not invent images but confiscates them. He lays claim to the culturally significant, poses as its interpreter. And in his hands the image becomes something other (allos= other + agoreuei =to speak). He does not restore an original meaning that may have been lost or obscured; allegory is not hermeneutics. Rather, he adds another meaning to the image. If he adds, however, he does so only to replace: the allegorical meaning supplants an antecedent one; it is a supplement. This is why allegory is condemned, but it is also the source of its theoretical significance.

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Posted by: Megan S | April 9, 2010 12:37 AM