Category: Image
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Forget design?
«Forget Photography» has a clever cover for a book that is a great read.1 Andrew Dewdney believes that the paradigm of photography can no longer explain what he calls the networked image. Photography can’t account for its central role in constructing capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy. Dewdney proposes, in short, to forget photography. He does…
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What about Ukraine?
It has been challenging for me to think about the implications of Ukraine’s war on graphic design. I haven’t read any texts or interventions on the subject. Before writing this post, I took a look at Aiga Eye on Design and Design Observer and found nothing. The same at Futuress. I don’t know if I…
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Peculiar Photo Books
Once in a while, I write about children’s photo books. Nowadays, most children’s books are illustrated, but there was a glorious period from the 1950s to the early 1980s when the format thrived, only to decline and almost disappear. I researched and collected those books to assess their unique narrative qualities and why the genre…
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Loose teeth
Some years ago, I collected several instances of the same engraved denture for an exhibition. Initially, it appeared on a Deberny & Peignot catalog of stock engravings. Then it found its way to a David Pelham Penguin cover, a recent book about censorship, a thick Portuguese humor anthology. I keep seeing it in all sorts…
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Graphic Design Tropes: Water on Flat Image
I love Oliver Munday’s cover for The Water Statues. It risks a literal interpretation of the title but pulls it off with an understated suggestion of tears. The use of drops of water over a flat surface, a drawing, or a photo of a statue hints at layers of distance and emotional unavailability. The subdued…
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Children’s photobooks
I found Amadou Alpiniste at a used bookshop half a decade ago. It’s such an uncanny object, a story about a little boy that climbs a mountain alone carrying a metal cross to honor his truck driver friend who died struck by a thunderbolt while mountain-climbing. It’s part of a series by photographer Suzi Pilet…
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Image in Spite of It All
This image haunts me since I learnt about its existence. It’s one of four images taken inside of a functioning nazi-camp by a Sonderkommando using a camera smuggled by the Polish resistance. It looks almost abstract but is nothing of the sort. It looks absent of all human and inhuman evidence except for the traces…
Unseen by Design 