Barbara Kruger

Magazine Design and Poetry: Arranging Images, Constructing Voices

Barbara Kruger grew up in Newark and studied at Syracuse University before attending Parsons School of Design in New York. At Parsons, she took classes with photographer Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who was also art director of Harper’s Bazaar^*1. She then joined Condé Nast and, as a designer at Mademoiselle, organized image selection, cropping, headlines, typefaces, and page sequences. According to The Broad’s biography, she became a head designer at twenty-two and later identified this experience as a major influence on her art^*2. Her magazine work taught her how the meaning of a single photograph could be folded into narratives of products, femininity, success, and desire through surrounding copy, white space, typography, and placement.

During the same period, Kruger wrote poetry and film and television criticism and took part in readings of poetry and prose. The National Gallery of Art records that from around 1969 she wrote poetry and film and television reviews alongside making art^*22. In magazines she arranged photographs and headlines; in writing she worked with speakers, forms of address, irony, and sentence breaks. Her later connection to poetry appears less in lyric expression than in her control over whose voice a short utterance seems to carry. After becoming dissatisfied with early works made from woven and sewn materials, she began photographing architecture. While teaching in places including Berkeley, she read Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. She later said that reading and thinking had become indispensable to her work^*23. In the work that followed, the voice assigned to a reproduced photograph and the authority given to words by their site of display became concrete artistic problems.

From Picture/Readings to Found Photographs: Moving from Narrative Voice to Social Voice

Kruger’s self-published Picture/Readings (1978) records a stage before the compressed slogans of her later work. She paired exterior photographs of houses and apartment buildings made in Berkeley, Los Angeles, Florida, and elsewhere with extended prose imagining the affection, boredom, desire, and disappointment of their inhabitants. An essay in Flash Art describes the texts as cinematic, novelistic, and melodramatic narratives, emphasizing that image and writing never settle into a relationship of mutual explanation^*24. The photographs show only the outside of the buildings, while the writing constructs interiors and psychological lives. The photographs do not serve as evidence for the stories, and the prose does not provide a correct reading of the architecture. Their separation brings into view the act of inferring other people’s lives from visible surfaces.

After this work, Kruger shifted from her own architectural photographs to images already published in magazines, photography manuals, and advertisements. Her central concern was how photographs and language tell people who they are and what they should desire. She has also said that images and words have the power to tell people who they are and who they cannot be^*22. Found photographs already carry roles—family member, woman, man, successful subject, obedient subject—through composition, clothing, expression, and gesture. Adding different language produces a gap between the role the image presents as natural and the role newly assigned by the text. The extended narratives that imagined interiors in Picture/Readings were compressed into short utterances in which readers must decide, in the moment, who belongs to “I,” “You,” and “We.”

In the United States of the late 1970s, existing images supplied by television, film, magazines, and advertising became artistic material. Artists associated with the Pictures Generation examined how images shape understandings of the self and the world. The Met explains that this tendency inherited the self-critical principles of Minimal and Conceptual art^*11. Kruger brought her experience in magazine production to this field, making the effects of captions, typography, scale, and display sites part of the work alongside the content of found photographs. By using existing images, she shifted attention from a photographer’s personal viewpoint to images repeatedly circulated through society and the ways they are used.

Placing Text over Photographs: Exposing the Grammar Embedded in Images

In magazines, photographs, headlines, and captions are produced through separate divisions of labor, and language directs photographic meaning from outside the image. Kruger placed text over faces, eyes, hands, and bodies, bringing that operation into the picture plane. Bands of type cover parts of the image and interrupt the act of looking. Typeface, weight, rectangles, and margins also make the words visible as graphic forms. A photograph becomes a surface read through syntax and pronouns, while language becomes material that blocks and directs the gaze. Her early paste-ups were made by arranging clipped found photographs and type on small boards, converting the composite into a negative, and enlarging it^*21. Both image and language become quotable fragments, and their point of contact displaces established meanings.

Kruger’s sentences are as brief as slogans, yet their speakers remain unstable. “I,” “You,” and “We” can move among an artist’s confession, an advertiser’s command, a state address, a lover’s words, and a viewer’s inner speech. The National Gallery of Art identifies direct address through active verbs and personal pronouns as a defining feature of her method and notes the tension it creates with figures who appear passive^*25. Her ties to poetry and performance emerge in the rhythm of short statements, repetition, altered quotations, and the pressure of words spoken aloud. I shop therefore I am converts Descartes’s proposition into the language of purchasing; Your body is a battleground combines a possessive pronoun with political conflict in a single sentence. Neither speaker nor addressee remains fixed, and each changes with the photograph to which the sentence is attached.

This form addresses photographic truth and the grammar through which images assign roles to viewers. Magazine and advertising photographs position their audiences as consumers, women, men, citizens, enemies, or supporters through headlines, tone, and medium. Kruger moved the power of the caption onto the photograph, exposing both the image’s content and the position assigned to the reader. The National Gallery of Art’s phrase “active visual reader” does not describe a reader who obeys the work’s commands. It describes someone who, faced with a mismatch between image and language, must reconstruct the speaker, the addressee, and the interests at stake^*25.

I shop therefore I am: Consumer Critique in Commercial Circulation

Untitled (I shop therefore I am) presents a red rectangle held in an open hand and replaces thought with purchasing as the ground of existence. The Broad holds a single-channel video/LED-panel version begun in 1987 and reconfigured in 2019^*7. MoMA’s 1990 version is a photolithograph printed on a shopping bag in an edition of 9,000^*12. The language of critique can itself be bought, carried, and repeated, placing a work about consumption within the conditions of commodity circulation.

Advertising appeal, reproduction, and commodification are both the work’s subjects and the means by which its critique circulates widely. MoMA explains that Kruger’s printed works appeared on book and magazine covers, matchbooks, mugs, shopping bags, and other objects, returning a visual language borrowed from mass media to those same channels^*12. MoMA’s 2022 exhibition combined remade earlier works with architectural installations, moving the same phrases among printed matter, video, walls, and floors^*4. Each change of medium alters the sentence’s meaning, the authority of its speaker, and the way it reaches an audience.

Your body is a battleground: A Divided Face and Political Circulation

Untitled (Your body is a battleground) divides a woman’s face into positive and negative halves and interrupts it with text across the center. The Broad explains that the work was created in 1989 for the Women’s March on Washington in support of reproductive freedom, functioning at once as an artwork and an image of protest^*6. The positive/negative reversal splits the face into opposing tones, while the central “your” directs the issue of the body toward the reader instead of confining it to the woman pictured.

The work joins the immediacy of a face with the public reach of a poster that can be reproduced and displayed. Kruger used the same visual language that circulated through law, news, advertising, and the street to intervene in the institutional decisions made about individual bodies. Its politics lies in the combination of subject, scale, display site, and mode of distribution.

From Magazine Collage to Walls, Floors, and Architecture

Kruger’s best-known works of the 1980s are relatively small photomontages that overlay bands of type on found black-and-white photographs. Their expansion into posters, billboards, T-shirts, buses, magazines, video, and sound changed the conditions of viewing. The Whitney describes large-scale installation and public art combining photography and text with moving image and sound as an important part of her work from the 1990s onward^*1. When viewers walk through language covering walls and floors, words operate as an environment that directs movement and occupies vision as well as a message read from the front.

The Hirshhorn Museum’s Belief+Doubt extends language through the lobby, around escalators, and into the museum shop, turning circulation routes and commercial space into one continuous work^*10. The Art Institute of Chicago’s large-scale exhibition Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. avoided a chronological retrospective structure, combining reworked earlier pieces, new sound and video, and interventions into the building^*8. At MoMA, the project likewise transformed architecture into an immersive environment and used direct address to expose the dynamics of identity, desire, consumption, and power^*4.

We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard: Reading Voice across a Series

The 1985 portfolio Untitled (We Will No Longer Be Seen and Not Heard) comprises nine prints that recast the conditions of visibility and silence historically assigned to people placed in subordinate positions. MoMA records it as a print portfolio combining offset lithography, screenprint, and collage-like techniques^*5. Across the nine sheets, a first-person plural sentence and different found images recur, changing the referent of the same “We” from one image to the next.

The work shows that Kruger’s method cannot be reduced to graphic design that places short copy over photographs. Repetition, pages, sequence, and edition size allow language to circulate beyond the owner of a single work. Photobooks, prints, magazines, and public spaces produce different speeds and audiences; Kruger has used the same verbal syntax while changing how it is read in each medium.

From Taking Photographs to Editing and Circulation

Kruger placed post-exposure selection, cropping, language, reproduction, and display at the center of artmaking. Through found photographs she addressed how repeatedly circulated images acquire authority^*11. The architectural photographs and extended narratives of Picture/Readings, the brief statements and photomontages of the 1980s, and the later architectural installations share a concern with how writing, medium, and site continually update an image’s meaning.

Bands of text cover parts of photographs, and their friction with the image prevents declarative sentences from settling into a single reading. As a work moves among poster, commodity, museum shop, public space, and digital screen, the tone and authority of the same sentence also change. From early paste-ups to architectural installations, the meanings of images and words have been reorganized by process and display site^*21. Her work shifted photographic attention beyond the author’s viewpoint at the moment of exposure to the editing, writing, display, and circulation through which existing images are reused.

Critique within Commodity Circulation: The Work’s Self-Reflexivity

Kruger’s self-reflexivity lies in building into the work the fact that critical language also operates within media, art institutions, and commodity circulation. I shop therefore I am printed a critique of consumption on shopping bags and circulated in an edition of 9,000^*12. Your body is a battleground entered museum collections while having been designed as a political poster for distribution in the street. Clear sentences, repeatable formats, and recognizable typography extend the reach of critique while also making that critique available as a commodity or sign.

In recent large-scale exhibitions, earlier works have been remade as video, LED displays, floor and wall graphics, and sound, changing how their phrases act in relation to technology and place. Belief+Doubt, which extends into a museum shop and circulation routes, creates an environment in which viewing, purchasing, and movement continue within the same institution^*10. Classification and address through images and words are the subjects of the work, and the work itself reaches people through museums, commodities, and public space.