Tabula Rasa: Copies and Originals in the Work of Sarah Charlesworth

In 1982, New York-based artist Sarah Charlesworth (American, 1947–2013) created four unique white-on-white silkscreen prints. Titled “Tabula Rasa,” a Latin phrase for an original condition, the series references the work of French photography pioneer Nicéphore Niépce. Charlesworth’s series comprises near-identical reproductions of a heliograph Niépce made in 1823–25—a still life often called “The Dinner Table,” depicting a dining table set for one in an outdoor garden. Niépce photographed the scene with a camera obscura, and the image’s original glass plate disappeared in the early 20^th century. Once regarded as the oldest surviving photograph, “The Dinner Table” now exists only in reproductions. Charlesworth photographed one such reproduction, in turn producing four life-size prints—each baring small, superimposed images and marks made by the artist.

Charlesworth, like many of her peers associated with the so-called Pictures Generation, began appropriating images from newspapers and magazines in the late 1970s in order to address problems of representation and authorship in contemporary culture. For many voices, the ascendance of the Pictures Generation and their lines of inquiry triggered a break with modernism—and, more specifically, the modernist view of the photograph as a unique product of the artist. While Charlesworth employed methods to interrogate originality, she also continuously sought to recover the value of photography. Utilizing “Tabula Rasa” as a critical case study in Charlesworth’s career-long fascination with the history of photography, this paper seeks to reconsider the photographic lives of the original and the copy through Charlesworth’s alternative modes of appropriation.