SITUATION #77

In Gerry Images, Geraldine Juárez appropriates the iconic stock photography watermark of Getty Images and applies it to mirrors in and around the exhibition space and in the town of Winterthur. The Watermark mirrors allow everyone to snap a selfie and turn it into a stock photograph, raising issues of value and prestige, as well as economic and political implications behind the intellectual property embodied by the watermark placeholder.

In 2014 Getty Images turned its watermark into an embed code, allowing the company to surveil the distribution of their digital images by acquiring user behaviour and automatically placing web ads every time an image is used online. For SITUATIONS/Placeholder, the artist has extended the series by creating the piece P362645 01: UNDATED FILE PHOTO: Portrait of Mark Getty. (Photo by Liaison), a site-specific version of the “digital watermark” that covers the museum windows with the embed code snippet for the portrait of Getty Images founder Mark Getty.

More by Geraldine Juárez: geraldine.juarez.se