Reimagining the Image: Penelope Umbrico

Penelope Umbrico discusses her more than two-decade career as a New York–based photographer. Umbrico’s practice combines traditional photographic techniques with radical methods of appropriation and reproduction that both rely on and examine visual culture in the digital age. Through image-sharing websites such as Flickr, Craigslist, and eBay, Umbrico uses the web as a collective archive of society-based material, alluding to both the producer and consumeristic aspects of online visual culture. During this program, Umbrico discusses her interest in the Internet-as-archive along with her project Everyone’s Photos Any License, which features 1,146,034 images of full moons found on Flickr.

Bio

Penelope Umbrico uses search engines, web platforms, common software applications, and imaging technologies to create multi-disciplinary works that explore screen space, light, and electronic signal in relation to the material detritus of technology. Her work navigates between producer and consumer, local and global, and the individual and the collective, with attention to the technologies that are produced by, and produce, these forces. Umbrico's work has been exhibited nationally and internationally and is included in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Milwaukee Art Museum; Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. She is the recipient of many awards, including a Sharpe-Walentas Studio Program Residency, a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship, and a Guggenheim Fellowship. Her monographs are published by Aperture and RVB Books, Paris. She lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.