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One of the reasons that these works were not looked at as singular artistic expressions was that the photographic images of artists like Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Simmons, Allan McCollum and Christopher Williams were "stolen" images that already existed. Most of them were circulating in the "low culture" of mass media, but sometimes the images were stolen from the realm of high culture as well—as in the case of Lawler and Levine. The artists had come across them while flipping through a magazine or watching TV, maybe startled by something in them, simultaneously disgusted and fascinated by the power of these images and the stereotypes they convey. The artists cropped them, re-photographed them, took them out of their original context and reused them for their own ends.