Richard Hamilton's 'Protest Pictures' have turned the galleries of Inverleith House in Edinburgh into a time-machine.[*] News events from the last fifty years flash up in every room, from a drug bust and a student murder in the 1960s, through the Troubles in the 1970s and 1980s, to the Gulf debacles of the last two decades. In each instance Hamilton is concerned to capture the mediation of the event in order both to deconstruct its effects and to turn them to his own ends.

LRB 14 August 2008 | PDF Download