Alfredo Jaar

ALFREDO JAAR: One aspect of my work is about what I call the politics of images. Images are important, and they affect the way we understand the world.

My name is Alfredo Jaar, and I'm here at the Smithsonian American Art Museum to discuss my work.

I started looking at the media—at the media landscape. That's when I decided to do a series of work about Life magazine. I started looking at this magazine for a long time and did a lot of research, and that's when I found this image.

The structure of the work is very simple. I just show the double page where the photograph was printed. I do not hide anything. You can see the thickness of the magazine, you can see the crease, and I've always used triptychs. It has been a part of my structural device that I've used in many, many other works. I like the one, two, three. The total is much more than its parts. I just wanted to make people see better, and I came up with this device of these black dots and red dots to simply show the proportion between African Americans attending the funeral and white people attending the funeral.

So that's why I work with images. They influence the way we think, they influence the way we imagine the world, they influence our knowledge of the world.

These images come to us without mercy, without warning. We are bombarded by thousands of images at every moment of our lives. A lot of my work responds to that reality.