Repetition, Tropes, and the Images We Carry
- Büşra Kuzu
- Dec 29, 2025
- 4 min read
I often find myself thinking about how easily an image appears in my mind, like...
(Of course, I'll start with) A tree,
A bowl of lentil soup (that is on every menu),
Or a cowboy.
The strange thing is not that these images appear, but that they appear already formed. They arrive with a specific angle, a specific color, a specific composition. They feel personal, yet somehow shared.
This is where my interest in mental representation begins, not with memory in a nostalgic sense, but with repetition. With the quiet accumulation of images, we see again and again until they become the default way we imagine something.
Many contemporary artists are not concerned with making images as much as with understanding what images do once they are seen.
So I've gathered some so that I could actually get inspired, hoping you will too.
Familiarity as a visual condition
In Untitled Film Stills, Cindy Sherman stages herself as women who feel instantly recognizable. None of the images belongs to an actual film, yet each one seems to recall something we have already seen. The familiarity is unsettling.
It exposes how cinematic repetition creates mental templates of femininity long before we question them. These are not images we consciously choose. They are installed through exposure.
A similar mechanism is visible in the work of Richard Prince. His re-photographed Marlboro cowboys remove branding but retain full meaning. The image no longer advertises a product. It advertises an idea. Masculinity. Freedom. The American West. The repetition has done its work. The image explains itself without context.
In both cases, repetition allows recognition, and recognition replaces curiosity.
Mental space as a closed structure
At this point, the question is no longer only about images, but about the structure of thought itself. This is where El Recinto Circular by Laura San Segundo enters the conversation in a subtle but important way.
San Segundo does not work with recognizable images or media references. Instead, she constructs a circular, enclosed system that functions as a metaphor for cognitive space. Thought loops back onto itself. Meaning is generated through repetition and return rather than expansion.
The circular form becomes a way of understanding how repetition does not simply accumulate, but organizes perception.
What resonates here is the idea of enclosure. Once a representation settles, whether visual or mental, it tends to reinforce itself. The circular form becomes a way of understanding how repetition does not simply accumulate, but organizes perception. The work makes visible the conditions under which images and ideas do not circulate freely, but rather slowly become fixed.
In this sense, El Recinto Circular feels deeply connected to image-based practices; even though it remains abstract, it addresses the same question all over. Read more about the work on ASX.
Collective seeing in digital culture
If repetition structures are thought internally, the internet accelerates this process collectively. The work of Penelope Umbrico makes visible something we usually experience only internally: the moment when an image stops feeling individual and starts feeling inevitable.
In her long-running project Suns from Sunsets from Flickr, Umbrico collects thousands of photographs of sunsets shared online and crops each image to isolate the sun. Displayed together, the suns blur into a vast field of near-identical forms. What initially feels poetic quickly becomes unsettling. The sunset, often imagined as a unique and personal experience, reveals itself as one of the most standardized images in contemporary visual culture.
In works such as TVs from Craigslist, where she gathers photographs of television screens posted for sale online, the object itself almost disappears. What remains is a repeated visual structure: the black rectangle, the reflection, the familiar framing. The image of the object becomes more stable than the object itself.
The same image, again and again, until it becomes the only image we can imagine.
What I find compelling is that her work does not accuse or moralize. It simply accumulates. It allows the viewer to recognize themselves inside the pattern. At some point, the realization arrives quietly: this image felt personal, but it never was.
In this sense, Umbrico’s practice makes the invisible visible. It shows how collective imagination is built not through grand narratives, but through small, repeated acts of seeing. The same image, again and again, until it becomes the only image we can imagine.
The same phenomenon appears in Photo Opportunities by Corinne Vionnet, where hundreds of tourist photographs of the same landmark are layered into a single image. Despite being taken by different people, the images align almost perfectly. The work reveals how we photograph places we have already seen, guided by an internal image that precedes the experience itself.
Seeing what we have been taught to see
Across these practices, a common thread emerges. Repetition does not merely produce familiarity, but it also produces structure.
Images settle into the mind. They become references, or, as an old philosopher said, "signifiers".
What feels personal often turns out to be collective. What feels natural is often learned.
I am not interested in rejecting images, but in noticing them. In asking when an image stops representing something and starts replacing it. In paying attention to the moment when imagination quietly becomes standardized.
Once you notice that, it becomes difficult to unsee.
