In Translation

Every week the Lewis Center offers talks, reading, exhibits, and showcases of brilliant and luminary minds who reside here on Princeton’s campus. On Wednesday night I had the privilege to be exposed to the life’s work of Sarah Charlesworth, our resident master photographer.

Beginning at 6:30 PM at the Lewis Center for the Arts on Nassau Street, Professor Charlesworth guided us through her oeuvre from 1977 all the way to 2012. As a part of Princeton’s fall lecture series, where new faculty work is showcased, this was a real treat to behold.

“I actually don’t think of myself as a photographer,” Professor Charlesworth said at one point, “I see photographs as the dominant language of our culture. I translate that.”

Beginning in 1977 with her first collection, “Modern History” Charlesworth was interested in letting an image speak for itself. Eliminating the words from copies of the Herald Tribune and other magazines from around the world allowed her to let the real message of the image shine through. From solar eclipses to international crises, these pictures tell it all.

Believing in the form as structure of an image, Charlesworth rejected color until her 1984 collection Objects of Desire, where she employed the vitality of color to draw attention to a pop culture that seduces the lay person into accepting conventional ideas about what and who we are.

In an effort not to rehash her life’s work, one can simply say that her images were breath-taking. Giving new lenses to those who admire the beautiful, some of her images are simply disturbing — but they are also strangely gorgeous in their nature as well. These images give insight into what it truly means to be human. How this imperfect nature impacts both human society and the natural world around us is a problem that Charlesworth deals with every day. And in answer, all she does is point and click.