BRIEF 2 : IF IT BLEEDS IT LEADS

OUGD404 

Three posters that will focus on a particular visual problem - the use of uncomfortable images in the media - and will be limited in each instance to: 

type only

type and image

image only.

Each poster will approach the problem through exploring contemporary graphic design in a public space. Due to the nature of the subject, you will need to give ethical consideration to your use of image and language.

Each of your posters should aim to discuss the use of uncomfortable images. 

Read Susan Sontag's essay Regarding the Pain of Others (Chapters 6 & 7) whilst researching images and reflect on Sontag's ideas on your blog. 

You should prepare your visual solutions for submission to the Toofprints or oripeau projects.

Toofprints

The exhibition surface is a 50 3/4"(W) x 39 1/2"(H) concrete slab, fitting up to two 25 3/8"(W) x 39 1/2"(H) posters, side by side.

Oripeau

The maximum poster size is 175cm x 91cm. You do not need to cover the entire panel (like everyone else). Feel free to experiment with something new.

Deliverables

1. BLOG (with posts tagged OUGD404) 

2. A MINIMUM OF 6 X A3 DESIGN BOARDS:

Rationale, Research, Initial Ideas, Design Development

Final Resolution/Production, Evaluation.

3. SUPPORTING PRACTICAL WORK:

3 x Final Posters: Studio Brief 2 - printed actual size on appropriate paper stock

Possible themes:

Impact of Social media

Memes

Body Politics

Yellow Vests

Nationalism

Trolls

Neo-cons and Snowflakes

Triggered, Gaslighting, No Platforming, …

Gentrification

Austerity

Gender identity

Brexit

Housing crisis

Immigration

Student debt

Censorship

Collect images and analyse:

What makes these images uncomfortable? (Link to ideas from Sontag)

What is their purpose?

How are they being used?

Please keep any supporting text for the image too.

Malcolm Barnard ‘Graphic Design as Communication’ (2005: 13-16) highlights four categories of graphic design’s function:

Information: impart knowledge

Persuasion: to convince or affect a change in thought or behaviour

Decoration: aesthetic function; enjoyment and pleasure, intended to please the spectator

Magic: ‘making something different from what it truly is’


“As objects of contemplation, images of the atrocious can answer to several different needs. To steel oneself against weakness. To make oneself more numb. To acknowledge the existence of the incorrigible.”

Susan Sontag

Incurable, Hopeless, Chronic, Unreformable, Beyond redemption incorrigible.

Susan Sontag 

“WHAT TO DO with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering?”

Susan Sontag

How should we respond to such images of atrocities?

What emotions would be desirable?

Is sympathy a valid response?

• Spectator “…suggests a link between the faraway sufferers… and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue.”
• Impotence “…mystifies our real relationships to power.”
• Innocence “we feel we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.”

“To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not an inappropriate—response.”

Susan Sontag

Is suspicion a valid response?

“It is impossible to glance through any newspaper, no matter what the day, the month or the year, without finding on every line the most frightful traces of human perversity... Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, lecheries, tortures, the evil deeds of princes, of nations, of private individuals; an orgy of universal atrocity. And it is with this loathsome appetizer that civilized man daily washes down his morning repast.”

Baudelaire, 1860s (emphasis mine)

Is suspicion a valid response?

“Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing our capacity to react.”

Susan Sontag

We live in a "society of spectacle”*. Each situation has to be turned into a spectacle to be real—that is, interesting—to us. People themselves aspire to become images: celebrities. Reality has abdicated. There are only representations: media.

Susan Sontag *Guy Debord (1967)

“It is common to say that war, like everything else that appears to be real, is mediatique. …that the war would be won or lost not by anything that happened in Sarajevo, or indeed in Bosnia, but by what happened in the media.”

Susan Sontag (emphasis mine)

We cynically assume images have little effect through oversaturation

We are cynical of the image’s ability to record reality as it really is* 

We are cynical of their actual purpose and intentions (as spectacle)

Susan Sontag     *The most extreme version would state: There is no reality.

“Citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk, are schooled to be cynical about the possibility of sincerity. Some people will do anything to keep themselves from being moved. How much easier, from one's chair, far from danger, to claim the position of superiority.” Sontag (emphasis mine)

An “Ecology of images” (Sontag)

In her earlier book On Photography, Sontag had originally called for an “ecology of images” – a cutting back of the endless onslaught of images, protecting the meaning of images and the reality they depict. 

An “Ecology of images” (Sontag)

Yet, in this text Sontag admits:

“There isn't going to be an ecology of images. No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock. And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.”

“Ecology of images” (Sontag)

Sontag refers to this idea now as a “conservative critique” – what does she mean by this?

An “Ecology of images” (Sontag)

”Conservative” because:

It assumes that every spectator is equal – that images play the same role within the lives of different people

Aimed at a Western reader/viewer

Who has the right to select and censor the use of images? Criteria?

How can you compare suffering? 

”Conservative” because:

It needs to state that a reality exists independent of the image (spectacle)

There exists suffering in the world, independent of media manipulation.

Any critical use of images needs to produce a defence of reality, so we can respond more fully to it.

“WHAT TO DO with such knowledge as photographs bring of faraway suffering?”

“our capacity to respond to our experiences with emotional freshness and ethical pertinence”

Susan Sontag

Is the appetite for such images vulgar or low?

How neutral are of the victims in the representation of their own sufferings?

Is it intolerable to have one's own sufferings twinned with somebody else’s?

What is the purpose of the image?

What is the image being used for?

How do the images change according to the context in which they are seen?

Make sure you write down all the questions and ideas that come up in discussion.