Collaboration: Visual literacy

Finding some visual literacy, analysing the message and then how the message is portrayed in terms of design will help my own design approach to the content that Kristina creates.

You get me? - Mahtab Hussain

Photographed over a nine-year period, You Get Me? by British artist Mahtab Hussain is a book centred on the experiences of young working-class South Asian Muslim men in contemporary Britain. Largely a book of portraits, it also documents the local environments of these men, picking up on manifest signs of multi-cultural identity.

The photographs in You Get Me? are interspersed with evocative extracts from Hussain’s numerous conversations with Muslim men, principally in London, Nottingham and Birmingham. Bringing issues of identity, masculinity, displacement and belonging to the fore, the book addresses concrete experiences of these men against a backdrop of derogatory media representations. Confronting the politics surrounding immigration and identity in Britain, Hussain at once celebrates the implicit agency of his photographic subjects, while recognising their struggle to determine a sense of self.

- The portrait front cover with the title 'you get me?' instantly allows the audience to start 'judging' the male and creating preconceptions about him, where he may be from, his morals etc. 

- The vibrant colour palette is appropriate when presenting images of young men as this reflects their age in the best way.

- There are a mixture of men presented in the book, well dressed, sporty ... in order to allow the audience to see how even from the same backgrounds they can form their own identities. 

There are no homosexuals in Iran - Laurence Rasti

Speaking at Columbia University on September 24, 2007, Iranian president at the time Mahmoud Ahmadinejad proclaimed: “In Iran, we do not have homosexuals like in your country.”

While most Western nations now officially accept homosexuality and some even same-sex marriage, homosexuality is still punishable by death in Iran. Homosexuals are not allowed to live out their sexuality there. Their only options are either to choose transsexuality, which is tolerated by law but considered pathological, or to flee.

In Denizli, a town in Turkey, hundreds of gay Iranians are stuck in a transit zone, their lives on hold, hoping against hope to be welcomed into a host country someday where they can start afresh and come out of the closet. Set in this state of limbo, where anonymity is the best protection, my photographs explore the sensitive concepts of identity and gender and seek to restore to each of these men the face their country stole from them.

The object of Rasti’s book is not to portray them as victims of political oppression and harrowing memories, but to focus on their current predicament and their hopes for a better, freer life in which to express their love and sexuality openly, beyond the reach of narrow sexual and gender dictates. The photographs paradoxically juxtapose light, simple, sometimes even festive elements with the gravity of the subject-matter and the precariousness of her subjects’ plight. Alternating between covered and uncovered faces, the series points up the difficulties these men face in reappropriating the identity space they’ve been deprived of.

New Europe - Paul Graham

New Europe confronts the Euro-utopian dream of a united continent with the screaming, uneventful banality of today and with the shadows of its past. Paul Graham’s colour photographs visualise history and show its effects in everyday life, even when it is unrecognised or contested and sometimes even trivialised until it ends up as a child’s toy. We encounter history when, from out of the depths of time, it hits the surface, whether we trip over its gravestone, pass it by unawares, or spit on it in contempt.

Interspersed are images of people from today, pictures of immersion, escaping, into music, alcohol, cigarettes, or drug addiction, into the ecstatic kick. These are pictures of a comprehensive commercialisation. Together with the signs of history, a physically experienceable portrait is formed of contemporary European reality, a social and psychological landscape, whose traces can be equally felt in things, gestures, and the indifferent faces – surrounded by the laughter of empty perspectives.

"New Europe is a fascinating example of how far the ‘new document’ has progressed to the beginning of the 1990s. For this kind of work – analytical, metaphorical, personal – the term ‘documentary’ itself would seem redundant, although that is not to say that the imagery itself neglects to analyse society or describe modern life. I believe that New Europe is one of the most important photobooks of the last five years. It is the best book that Graham has made to date, his most difficult and his most lyrical. It also might be a flagship for the New European photography, marking a moment when Paul Graham moved from being a parochial British photographer to a truly international one.“ (Gerry Badger)


- The use of metaphorical objects within the book effectively builds up more of a story about each of the models and their environments than without them.

- The wrap around sleeve adds a personal element and acts as a method of revealing the content and the messages that Paul is trying to portray.

- The idea of having 3/4 images to start the book and then the title page after this with some writing after it works well to portray the idea of prejudgment and preconcepted ideas in association to the Islamic girls.

Androgyne: Fashion and Gender - Patrick Mauriès

‘This ad is gender neutral’, proclaimed a recent poster for Diesel; ‘I resist definitions’, announced a Calvin Klein campaign; while a Louis Vuitton shoot featured Jaden Smith, son of actor Will Smith, wearing a skirt like a natural. Fashion magazines have printed countless features on the blurring of gender boundaries, while brands including Yves Saint Laurent, Gucci, Burberry, Givenchy and Dolce & Gabbana have all interpreted this theme in their own distinctive style.

Androgyny is nothing new: it has been a leitmotif of western culture for millennia, beguiling and preoccupying artists and writers since Plato. The blending of genders was a constant through the cultural waves of the 20th century, from Berlin in the 1920s and Hollywood in the 1930s, to the androgynous pop stars of the 1970s, 1980s and beyond – Jagger, Bowie, Grace Jones…

What do these variations on a theme have in common? And what has caused the dizzying resurgence of androgyny in the twenty-first century? This book places images by some of the world’s greatest fashion designers and photographers alongside works of art and portraiture from many eras. It presents a condensed cultural history of androgyny, drawing on the worlds of art and literature to give us a deeper understanding of the timeless human drive to break free from defined categories.

- The modern day image is contrasted with an older period with a similar style and the layout of this is consistent throughout the book, the smaller image paired with the larger. 

- A deeper understanding of the human drive to break free from categories has been achieved by placing images paired with images that initially you may not relate, but this shows that categories can be formed from anything.

- The typographic front cover works well to represent the bold subculture and the sans serif typeface shows that the modern content, is paired with hsitorical content which is represented by also including a serif typeface.

Women in Bali Book - Bruna Rotunno

Photography book (photographic journey) made by Bruna Rotunno. Tribute to the island and all the women living there. Consisting of more than 150 pages of photographs, accompanied by words written by Anita Rococo and Cok Sawitri. Published by Silvana Editorial. 

A journey into the feminine heart of the island where water is still venerated as Holy Water, the sacred origin of all life. A long story of women, who are always different and in their complexity symbiotically express the strength and the grace of a place, where nature and spirituality are harmoniously combined with respect for life.

- The text within this book is small and well organised, keeping the focus on the image. By having the text with a larg amount of space around it keeps the importance and credibility. This could be something that I should consider when designing the book with Kristina, the writing that is part of our content holds much significance within the book and will reveal alot about the images. The consideration of size of text is important and having it small may represent the idea of prejudgment and gradually revealing more about the women as it is not intrusive to the images. 

- If text is paired with a dark image, the colour of the background of theimage is continued across the page and the writing is made white. This works well to ensure that the harmonious nature within Bali is taken into account and reflected through the design. 

- The square book effectively crops all of the images to allow the audience to have a close relationship and insight into the women of Bali, more personal and involved than if the images were placed small on a large page. 

- The mixture of black and white images and colour images effectively leaves some things to the audiences imagination, something that may be suitable for the publication I am creating. The images of the metaphorical objects that will be part of the Islamophobia content wll be placed in the book to be subjective and will be the only part that the audience can make up their own judgements.