Repair/Retouch Series: An Allegory on Wholeness (Plate and Man with Crutches)

Baldessari, an influential conceptual artist and teacher at the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts), made his first photographic works in the late 1960s. He began to experiment with retouching in the mid-1970s, inspired by rumors that marketing agencies were secretly embedding subliminal messages in advertisements. Here, he used paint and airbrush to “heal” a one-legged man and a broken dish—a droll twist on the metaphor of “doctoring” photographs.