This symbolic image is an artistic attempt to conjure a new image of reality. Here, the iconic figure of the Statue of Liberty is submerged in an enormous crater caused by a bomb, but madly holding up a dollar bill, rather than the torch she normally carries, as if money is the most important thing, even when the world is crashing down. Kennard says: “With a lot of these images, when I make them, some of them don’t have an idea to start with. The idea starts with going through images. I have what I call a ‘dictionary’ of images, 35m negatives, hundreds of them, that I have photographed. When I make a new work, I just go through them and the images connect. The thing about montage is that you connect things together, so the Statue of Liberty has a hand, and if you put a dollar into the hand, it has a reality to it. It’s looking for those visual connections all the time that’s important.” – Peter Kennard