Tracing the artistic manipulation of advertising, the exhibition explores how creative innovations since the 1970s have spurred dramatic shifts in the possibilities for photography as artistic expression and how photo-based artists reworked advertising strategies to challenge the increased commodification of daily life. By exploiting the visual vocabulary of advertising—the most powerful, mainstream visual language—and adopting its sites and formats, artists like Roe Ethridge, Barbara Kruger, Carter Mull, and Hank Willis Thomas create a shared photographic language that puts the onus on the viewer to determine what exactly these pictures ask of them.