The Genuine in a World of Copies

In the 1970s, the desire to integrate photography into a broader art context was still a minority position. Two decades later, however, when Charles Desmarais was director of the Laguna Art Museum, photography had become mainstream, and the medium had been all but fully embraced by the contemporary art world. Desmarais welcomed this shift. But, as he told me recently, he regretted that while Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Barbara Kruger, and other members of the so-called Pictures Generation had become art world darlings, many of the photographers and artists he knew and admired in Southern California who used photography in their work had been “left behind.” With , an exhibition he organized for the Laguna Art Museum in 1992, Desmarais made a caseas photographer and educator Robert Heinecken, along with artists Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, and Wallace Berman, had anticipated, in some cases by several decades, many of the concerns that would later come to define postmodernism and the work of the Pictures Generation group.