I recently visited the Mexican Cultural Institute in downtown Los Angeles to see the 40th anniversary commemorative exhibition on the Chicano Moratorium, an anti-war movement that organized protests in East Los Angeles from 1969-71. The protests had been marred by rioting and historically marked by the violent death of Los Angeles Times journalist Ruben Salazar, who was fatally struck in the head by a tear gas projectile that had been fired by a Los Angeles County Deputy Sheriff. In the exhibit, I found myself drawn to an untitled photograph by Victor Aleman. I was riveted by the personal significance of the grainy black and white image depicting several police officers and protesters on a familiar street corner in East L.A.

Film stills are useful to Baldessari precisely because they are detached from the movie, cut away from their meaningful context. His inventory of film stills constitutes a deep image bank of 20th century American culture, a proliferation of images that haunt us, or at least those of us old enough to remember watching black-and-white movies on TV in the afternoons after school. Arguably those born after about 1980 have internalized an entirely different kind of image bank, a digital one, which exists without limits, instantly available, taking up no space, and requiring only a wireless connection and a screen.