1967: Martha Rosler, "Bringing the War Home"

"These ten photographs from Martha Rosler's Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, 1967-72, utilize the collage technique favored by the Surrealists and later the Pop artists; but Rosler's central concern isn't the unconscious, the ironic or the formal. Produced during the peak of U.S. military engagement in Vietnam and an outgrowth of Rosler's own involvement with anti-war activities, these photomontages are a response to the artist's "frustration with the images we saw in television and print media, even with anti-war flyers and posters. The images we saw were always very far away, in a place we couldn't imagine."1 Assembled from the pages of Life magazine — where the documentary accounts of blown bodies, dead babies, and anguished faces flow seamlessly into mattress ads and photo features of sophisticated kitchens, fastidiously fertilized lawns and art-hung living rooms — Rosler's montages re-connect two sides of human experience, the war in Vietnam, and the living rooms in Amerika, which have been falsely separated." [more...]

View the series at the MOMA website