In 1981, Sherrie Levine appropriated famous photographs by Walker Evans by photographing them from a catalog, referencing the progressing musealization of documentary photography and questioning the concepts of authorship, creativity, and originality. The photographs Levine took were almost indistinguishable from those Evans had taken fifty years earlier.

With +walker evans +sherrie levine Hermann Zschiegner takes this reflection on appropriation, remediation, and authorship to the digital age by showing that circulating “poor images” (Hito Steyerl) further obfuscate the material and the ontological differences between Evans’s and Levine’s photos, but at the same time metadata such as file names and URLs help identify their origin.

The title of Zschiegner’s book contains the search parameter of his Google image search conducted on July 24, 2008, which resulted in twenty-six found images of Evans’s most famous photograph, depicting Allie Mae Burroughs. These twenty-six images are sorted in descending order by file size and “positioned to match the original print with any white space around the image representing the cropped area of the reproduced picture. File size, pixel aspect ratio and URL of all images are included as a frame of reference. It is only in reading the file names that we can identify if the reproduced image is a Levine or an Evans” (Hermann Zschiegner, artist’s note).