An MFA graduate of the San Francisco Art Institute, Harry Bowers produced a large body of photographs in the late 1970s of articles of clothing he discovered in thrift stores. The artist composed and pressed the found items behind a glass frame, photographing them in sequences that seem to bring the garments to life. Bowers's use of large color negatives and positives combine with his flattening of the clothing to fool the eye (trompe-l'oeil) into seeing the actual objects contained in the frame rather than their photographic image. "I don't want to make a photograph that cries out, 'This is a photograph,'" he later wrote. "My pieces do not look like photographs; they look like what I'm photographing—the thing itself. I don't document reality. You can't look through my photographs to see the world; they are not windows or mirrors. They are their own reality."