Rephotography is a technique for stealing (pirating) already existing images,
simulating rather than copying them, "managing" rather than quoting
them, re-producing their effect and look as naturally as they had been produced when they first appeared. A resemblance more than a reproduction, a rephotograph is essentially an appropriation of what's already real about an existing image and an attempt to add on or additionalize this reality onto something more real, a virtuoso real, a reality that has the chances of looking real, but a reality that doesn't have any chances of being real. The technique is a physical activity which locates an individual behind a camera, a place from which the individual can view nothing but the collected image, a place that affords the opportunity to view exactly how the audience will eventually see the image as an object and a location from which it is possible for an individual to identify him or herself as much as an audience as an author.
Appropriation 1978
I think appropriation has to do with the inability of the author/artist to
like his or her own work. Especially if the work is all theirs. I think it's a
lot more satisfying to appropriate, especially if you are attempting to
produce work with a certain believability, an official fiction let's say. If you
take someone else's work and call it your own, you don't have to ask an audience
"to take my word for it". It's not like it started with you and ended up being
guessed at. The effect you want to produce is not that different from what an
audience sometimes experiences when viewing a good movie. And what's that?
What Cristian Metz called, "a general lowering of wakefulness".