Unbranded

“I’ve always been interested in the power that advertising has on language. We read them before we’re even aware that we saw them, because most of us now are immediately literate. I first was making works that looked like ads, and then started to realize maybe truth was better than fiction. So I actually use real ads as a way to talk about how advertisements shape our notions of reality, our notions of ourselves and especially our notions of others.”
Hank Willis Thomas


Good thing he kept his head (1962): original ad

Concept artist Hank Willis Thomas, who likes to think of himself as a "visual culture archeologist, or a DJ" (via) is fascinated by the rhetoric of advertisements, the selling of products and of stereotypes. When he realised that the real message was not to be found in their texts but in the images he erased the texts emphasising the "not-so-latent subtexts" (via).

“I’m using these materials that have been discarded or forgotten, and am trying to elevate them to give them new life, new conversation and new purpose, that speaks to the original mission of selling a product. It’s interesting because you can rarely tell what the original product was for. The image and the product rarely have anything in common.”
Hank Willis Thomas

The game is Broomsticks (1967, Thomas was uneasy to use this ad, via): original ad

"When you market towards any demographic, you have to be prejudiced."
Hank Willis Thomas

"Thomas’s work 'unbrands' advertising: stripping away the commercial context, and leaving the exposed image to speak for itself. Without the text and taglines we would normally lean on to decipher the adverts, we are forced to read between the lines and think more deeply about what the images are actually selling – which, you begin to see, is an ideal of femininity encapsulated in AdLand’s 'white woman'" (literally via). According to Hank Willis Thomas, by removing texts and logos, i.e. by "unbranding" the advertisements "(T)hey become naked in a way. You're looking at what's really being sold. The message that's sometimes being hidden by the logo and the copy." (via)


Come out of the bone age, darling (1955): original ad

“I learn as much from what other people have to say about it as what I have to say about it. I guess I would sum it up by saying the work is not really about white women, it’s about people. How people are put into a group and how complicated and ever-evolving the notions of club membership and authenticity in the group are. It’s weird to look at ‘white women’ and see this.”Hank Willis Thomas

Most of the advertisements Hank Willis Thomas exhibits in connection with his series "Unbranded: A Century of White Women, 1915-2015" show women with husbands or daughters; women together with female friends while fully clothed are hardly observed. Those in female company tend to be in bikinis, not looking at each other but rather at the - probably - male spectator. Often, women are not really in companionship but in competition. Women's role in society clearly changed between 1915 and 2015. When women got more rights such as the right to vote, they were pictured driving cars. In the 1940s, they were dressed as soldiers, later as career women. At the same time, this empowerment seems to be punished by objectifying women in advertisements (via). Observing the fictional white woman through the times is like a narrative:

"When the project started in 1915, print advertising and especially photography were very new. Graphic design and images were having a revolutionary moment. By the '30s and '40s, you can tell advertisers and graphic designers had kind of figured out something."
Hank Willis Thomas

No seams to worry about (1954): original ad

“I think ads are very much a reflection of the hopes and dreams of a culture at a particular moment in time and that’s why they’re so powerful and potent as historical documents and artistic works.”
Hank Willis Thomas

"And with the golden age of advertising — which is kind of what Mad Men is about — you see this intense pushback about putting a woman in her place. And at the same time, more and more women are getting places in the board room or are at least taking part in the conversation, so there’s progress in that sense. For every two or three sexist images you’ll find one that’s somewhat progressive. But then again, something that’s seen as progressive at the time may seem marginalizing and sexist today. That’s something I think is interesting. In trying to read this images, it’s almost like you have to go into a time machine to really understand what it was like for the people seeing these for the first time."
Hank Willis Thomas


Triumph of Europe (1960): original ad

"I always talk about racism (sic) as the most successful advertising campaign of all time."
Hank Willis Thomas

For his previous series, "Unbranded: Reflections in Black by Corporate America, 1968-2000", Hank Willis Thomas collected advertisements printed in magazines between Martin Luther King's assassination and Barack Obama's election. Based on the criterion which ad captured best the atmosphere of mainstream society at the time, he selected one per year. His first project coincided with the election of President Obama, his second one with the potential election of a female president (via). "Unbranded" gives a sense of history (via).

"In the last presidential cycle, there was this whole debate where people were going back and forth between Hillary [Clinton] and Obama, questioning are you more racist or more sexist? That’s a way of dumbing it down, obviously. But I realize that we might be on the verge of having our first female president, a white woman. I want to look at how someone like her might have been looked at or treated or spoken to back then, and today.”Hank Willis Thomas

Captivating textures from the Leggy World of Berkshire (1965): original ad

"'Unbranded' is a series of images taken from magazine advertisements targeting a black audience or featuring black subjects, which I digitally manipulated and appropriated. In this work-in-progress project that will ultimately span from 1969 through the present, I have removed all aspects of advertising information, e.g., text, logos, in order to reveal what is being sold. Nothing more has been altered. I believe that in part, advertising's success rests on its ability to reinforce generalizations around race, gender, and ethnicity that can be entertaining, sometimes true, and sometimes horrifying, but which at a core level are a reflection of the way a culture views itself or aspirations. By 'Unbranding' advertisements I can literally expose what Roland Barthes refers to as 'what-goes-without-saying' in ads, and hopefully encourage viewers to look harder and think deeper about the empire of signs that have become second nature to our experience of life in the modern world."
Hank Willis Thomas

“Whiteness is something I’m fascinated with because it’s ever evolving. One hundred years ago a lot of people we call white today would not be considered white. And also, a hundred years ago women in the U.S. didn’t have the right to vote. And, even though African American men technically did, everything was done to make sure they didn’t. I’m interested in how white women — who are often seen as the most valuable — are at the same time marginalized.”
Hank Willis Thomas

“I always like to stress that the craziest thing about blackness is that black people never had much to do with actually creating it. It was actually created with commercial interest in order to turn people into property. The colonialists had to come up with a subhuman brand of person and that marketing campaign was race.”
Hank Willis Thomas


The Mistress Collection by Funky (1974): original ad; Hank Willis Thomas about it: read

“Most people of color are very used to society not respecting them for any number of reasons. But there is also this huge population of white women who will never fit into the standards of value that society has created."
Hank Willis Thomas

“I’m interested in finding new ways of revealing things that are kind of latent in a given image. I talk about my work as an archaeology in a sense, and I might consider myself a photographic archaeologist, or a visual culture archaeologist. I believe that all the content in my work is really about framing and context, is about calling the viewer to think about how their position affects what they see.”
Hank Willis Thomas

“One thing I can say definitively is that it’s much more complicated and diverse now than it was 100 years ago. Now you see the same sex couples, the over-sexualized people, the family person, the business person. It’s much more diluted than it once was.”
Hank Willis Thomas


The Breakfast Belle (1915)

“What I’m most interested in these ads is not only how other people see us but also how we see our selves; what we can learn about our own assumptions, as well as how we were/are ‘othered.’”
Hank Willis Thomas

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photographs via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via and via; inspired by Hyperallergic