The language of images.

A positive piece of promotional material for a brand, a positive piece of material for a piece of music, a negative piece of critical journalism and a negative parody, perhaps the most taxing brief I have ever been given. After having completed our photo shoot, and chosen our favourite images, we were only then made aware of what we would be working towards. I’m not sure if I was in the minority, but I actually really liked this unconventional ‘backwards’ approach to working. I felt as though it allowed me to develop a whole new rational, and a more complex way of thinking about imagery. The task allowed us to think about imagery in relation to words, again, I was incredibly excited by this for the utterly sad reason that I love nothing more than a good rifle through a thesaurus and a nice new bit of vocab in my life (good old English Literature A level faring me well). We were advised to aim for around 3-15 words that we felt were punchy, applicable to our photos and fitting with the brief. I did a little bit of research into the importance of words in marketing, learning of the importance of repetition, alliteration, personal pronouns and audience identification. In lieu of this research I thought the best place to start would be with the critical article title. I decided to play off the idea of black as a colour of mourning in the western world, alongside incorporating a topic very close to my heart; fast fashion. Titling the article ‘A Fast Fashion Funeral: how your habits are hurting us all’. I felt the relatable urban background makes the image both accessible and a little bit bleak. In my opinion the bleak hostility allows the audience a sense of the problems their actions may bring without even reading the article. I decided to use hyperbolic language to captivate the audience, alongside using personal pronouns to address the observer directly, all with hopes of drawing people into the article.

With one down and three to go, I decided to confront the beast that is photoshop and move onto the piece of positive promotional material. My initial, depressingly conservative plan was to do a piece of work for a brand renowned for their grunge style or synonymous with black clothing, such as Dr Martens or All Saints. However, a sudden light bulb moment saw me think of Dulux paint, and I had all sorts of ideas of adding splashes of colour to my images and some sort of phrase relating to colouring your world. That was until I realised I was a few years too late, their series of adverts depicting a paint spillage in a colour prohibited world aired in around 2014, and had somewhat bypassed my memory manifesting itself in my head as my own idea. My confidence knocked and my thought-bank exhausted I decided to take my mind off the matter by doing some laundry. Then it twigged. I decided I would try and be funny (something that is yet to go well in my life) and attempt an advert for colour catcher. I wanted to keep the advert looking light hearted to reflect the tone of the phrase so added a purposefully shoddy looking blue background to match the hapless theme of the whole thing.I wanted to keep the phrasing as short as possible for maximum punchline, and decided to utilize the idea of dramatic irony, suggesting that one party is completely unaware of the mayhem unfolding, adding to its (what I hope is a) comedic effect.

Next I moved on to the brief I was most excited about, the album cover. As a self proclaimed music nerd and avid vinyl collector I can think of nothing more enjoyable than creating my own piece of artwork. I decided to run with the theme of black as both a provocative colour, and one associated with religion and humility (as I have written about in a previous post). After trawling through my spotify playlists to find a song that would incorporate both influences, I came across an all time favourite dad music song, New Order, The Age of Consent. The song title encompasses both the sexual side of black as a colour and the notion of sex as something sinful and to be wary of (as many religions agree is the case). The recurring lyric ‘I lost you’ at the end of the song signifies the loss of one’s self with the loss of virginity, which again I thought related heavily to the idea of black as a colour of modesty, making it a perfect song to relate to my image.

Finally I faced what I thought was the hardest task. The parody. We were told to somehow parody our image, which even my incredibly self critical and deprecating self found a task. I decided to take a route which is actually just one of mine and my boyfriend’s favourite past times, we love nothing more than a trip round Urban Outfitters playing spot the Gosha rip off. I wanted to criticize not only the saturated market for black clothes, but the idea of fast fashion brands essentially ripping off original designs. I’m not saying that every trend must remain confined to one fashion house, but questions must be raised when fashion giants such as H&M and Zara begin to rake in the profits from stolen designs (I’ll park this rant here, just make sure to keep your eyes out for a strongly worded blog post on the matter in a short while).

I decided to use snapchat, again because this is the platform I usually use for such an activity, and why fix something that’s not broken. Overall I have to say I enjoyed this task much more than I anticipated, especially having not been overly proud of my original photos, I am very impressed that I didn’t get completely stumped on any of the tasks which I guess is a plus, and I very much look forward to the rest of the course and developing my skills further.

Over and out, Lucy x