Sherrie Levine

Sherrie Levine's practice is the empirical test case for Krauss's theoretical claims about originality, reproduction, and the simulacrum. In 1981, Levine exhibited photographs she had taken of photographs—specifically, re-photographs of Walker Evans's iconic Depression-era images—and presented them as her own work under the title After Walker Evans. The gesture was calculated to produce categorical discomfort: if Evans's photographs were valued for their indexical connection to the rural poor who stood before his camera, what was the status of Levine's copies? They depicted the same subjects, displayed the same compositions, carried the same visual information. But they bore no causal connection to the original subjects. They were copies of copies—simulacra that referred not to any original reality but to the circulation of Evans's images through books, catalogs, and art-world discourse. The work was not plagiarism but critique—a demonstration that the "original" Evans photograph was itself a product of mechanical reproduction and that the distinction between original and copy was an institutional construction serving an economy of cultural value rather than