Every Image Is a Weapon

On the practice of stealing pictures and making them tell the truth they were designed to conceal.

Last winter I spent three weeks in a basement printshop on Rue de la Harpe, cutting advertisements from the illustrated press and pasting new words over the originals. The technique is simple. The difficulty is seeing what the image was already saying about obedience and silence.

The Comic Strip as Confession

The comic strip was the perfect vehicle from the start. That innocent white ellipse — the speech bubble — is already the image's confession of what it cannot say aloud. When we replaced the cartoon character's words with revolutionary theory, we completed what the artist left unfinished.

"To reverse the charge of the weapon — to turn the cannon toward the palace."