This photograph by Sara Cwynar is part of a larger series inspired by John Berger’s Ways of Seeing (1972), a book that examines how images influence our understanding of the world.
For this series, Cwynar gathered illustrations from the same encyclopedia entry across different print editions and languages. By tracing which images appeared most frequently and how they changed over time, she explores how knowledge was organized and circulated. Physically arranged and photographed in her studio, the work can be read as a pre-internet search results page. Viewing information in this way, through its repetitions and variations, highlights how systems of authority, status, and gender can reinforce particular narratives.
This lightbox installation is connected to Baby Blue Benzo Beta, on view on Floor 2 of the museum.
About Sara Cwynar
Sara Cwynar (Vancouver, BC, 1985) lives and works in New York. Her work in photography, video and installation involves a constant archiving and re-presentation of collected visual materials. For over 10 years she has been evolving her own personal visual language in installation, photography and film, revealing the powerful role that images play in our daily lives. Using dated and contemporary commercial images she exposes the failure, with time, of the visual trickery and the waning of the seductive powers of popular images, and the way the images that once seduced are replaced with new ones in increasingly rapid cycles. She tries to think about who all this material is really for, what latent power dynamics are contained by our images, and how contemporary concepts of freedom, agency and power are tied up and reproduced in images.
Recently, she has expanded her photography work to include moving image and immersive installation. Her most recent exhibition, Baby Blue Benzo, is an overwhelming environment of obsessively constructed images and video.
Cwynar holds an MFA from Yale University and a BDes from York University. Past projects include a commission for the Performa Biennial, New York (2021), “S/S 23”, Foam Photography Museum, Amsterdam (2023) “Apple Red, Grass Green, Sky Blue, ICA Los Angeles (2022)” “Source,” Remai Modern (2021), “L’Image Volée,” Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy (2016); and “Greater New York,” MoMA PS1, Queens, NY (2015/16). Cwynar’s works are held in the collections of The MoMA, New York, the Centre Pompidou, Paris; MMK Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and the National Gallery of Canada among others. In 2024 and 2025 she presented new solo exhibitions at 52 Walker in New York and ICA Boston in Boston, MA and received a Guggenheim Foundation Grant. In 2026 she will present new solo exhibitions at The Approach, London, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Toronto, and Esther Schipper, Berlin.
