Kent State, 1970

Richard Hamilton’s Kent State (1970) responds to the tragic events at Kent State University in Ohio, where National Guard soldiers opened fire on anti-Vietnam War demonstrators, killing four students and wounding others. Strongly opposed to America’s involvement in Vietnam, Hamilton used the broad reach of a large-scale edition to create a powerful indictment of the war. The work depicts a fallen student and is based on a still photograph taken from a television screen during a BBC broadcast of the event.

Hamilton, one of the most inventive artists to incorporate photographic imagery into his work, preserves the blurred and distorted quality of the televised image. The hazy contours and overlapping colours convey both the immediacy and disorientation of the event as it entered public consciousness through the mass media. By transforming a television image of political violence into a widely distributed print, Hamilton reflects on the relationship between photography, mass communication and the representation of contemporary events. Kent State is in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Tate, London.