PHOTOGRAPHS
Haddock, Jon
U.S. (1960 - )
12 Angry Men
2000
Chromogenic color print
22 1/2 x 30 in. (57.2 x 76.2 cm) image size; 23 3/8 x 30 3/4 in. (59.4 x 78.1 cm) sheet size; 24 1/8 x 31 1/2 x 13/16 in. (61.4 x 80 x 2.1 cm) frame size
Gift of William and Ruth True
FA 2011.23.1

To make the works in his Screenshot Series, Jon Haddock takes moments from movies or iconic images of historical events that are embedded in his memory, and digitally alters them to shift the point of view and simplify the form. While the scene looks familiar, we are oddly removed, looking down from the isometric perspective used in computer games-- Label copy by Sylvia Wolf, Director, for The Digital Eye: Photographic Art in the Electronic Age, July 9 to September 25, 2011.


These images were inspired by the artist’s disappointment in the politics of The Sims, a virtual dollhouse computer game, and its promotion of consumer-centered behaviors that forsake the complex systems and injustices that undergird reality. In the resulting digital drawings, Haddock reanimated significant events from the past that have been seared into his memory through iconic images within our shared visual culture and collective history. In re-creating these images, Haddock probes their potential to continue to bear meaning and rouse social consciousness in our contemporary image-saturated culture where content circulates within the unmediated space of the online, public archive.
Among the events depicted are the infamous fire hose attack on civil rights protestors in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, the suicide of Thich Quang Duc in protest of the Vietnam War also in 1963, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold in the cafeteria of Columbine High School where they committed a mass shooting in 1999, and the raid and seizure of the young Cuban boy Elián González by Unites States Immigration and Naturalization Service agents in 2000. Interspersed among these actual events, are several scenes from movies, including the Sound of Music and 12 Angry Men. Blurring fact and fiction in search of truth, Haddock creates a context to revisit events from the past in the context of the present, foregrounding the entangled systems of power and oppression, and cultures of violence that shape lived reality.

Label copy for The Time. The Place. Contemporary Art from the Collection, November 4, 2017 to April 22, 20118.