Working in pairs, this half-day project asks you to consider the visual narrative as a specific ‘event’ in which you collectively explore a specific theme – in this case, imagery sourced from newspapers of the day. This is a type of photobook which comprises entirely of found imagery. Your task, as editors-authors, is one of selection; photo-copying (at 100% or enlarging/reducing – cropping if you wish), ordering and reordering of the photographic material to create a re-presentation of the related news stories of the day.
This brief was very, very picky. I had so many ideas that were shot down by the parameters of the brief, but hey, that’s Graphic Design. I couldn’t use advertisements that would have pushed the narrative I had chosen, I could only take my imagery from one newspaper, and I could only tell one story. It was difficult, but thankfully, my partner and I had chosen the best newspaper for sensationalist stories that we could spin: The Daily Mail.
We chose an article about why Parisian women over 50 are the best looking over 50’s women in the world. The answer; plastic surgery. We decided to depict this using the image of a women in post-op bandaging as the cover, with the colours of the french flag interspersed throughout. We told a narrative of how plastic surgery makes a woman desirable once they reach a certain age, and that showing signs of ageing is inherently bad, easily communicated on the second page with the baby in green (universally coded as good) and the visibly ageing woman in red (obviously negative).
It then tells a story, without words, of a woman changing her face, subsequently gaining the attention of a man, and having a happily every after; ultimately ending on a baby as the cycle goes on.
We didn’t want to paint the story in an inherently negative light, as it is simply telling the narrative that the news story depicted. We all have our own personal views on plastic surgery, and it’s up to the audience to decide whether it’s a happy story or a sad one. It can be seen as an older woman changing herself to be loved, and therefore losing herself, or it can be seen as an older woman paving her own way in order to find love.
An inspiration for this photo book is the work of Inge Jacobbsen, an artist and embroiderer who’s works are often manipulations of magazines and the women in them. Her obvious hodge-podge of an approach in the bottom piece likens to our pages wherein we used Michelle Visage’s face with other women’s noses and lips to represent makeup and surgery.
Overall I think that towards the end our narrative got a bit too obvious. I really liked the ambiguity of the first lot of pages, but at least it got the job done. If I did it again, I do think that I would stick to exclusively using red white and blue, as I think the added green (whilst effective at communicating the points necessary) muddled the French tone we had achieved in the first page.
Prosaic Vocabulary 