Astronauts and Businessmen

John Baldessari is best known for his juxtapositions of found photographs or film stills, removing them from their original context to expose the myriad ways in which photographic images can be organized and understood.

Baldessari made this collage just after the United States launched Discovery, the first manned space mission since the Challenger disaster in 1986. In the upper half, three astronauts stride confidently out of a space vehicle, having just completed a mission. The lower half features a group portrait of nine businessmen. Obscuring the figures’ faces with circles—primary-colored for the astronauts, black for the businessmen—Baldessari erases their individuality and underscores the direct link between the space program and the economic prosperity of the 1980s.