‘It creates its own logic’ – The newspaper is a funny history of our world, a very obviously controlled lens through which to look at the everyday. We all recognize the choices inherent to the news, the bias that lives in headlines and image choice and what stories are included, yet it still holds this feeling of unquestionable fact due to its physicality. So, it is funny to look at the newspaper past the daily issues and as a larger whole, to find the logic behind the seemingly random choices that craft it. It can be between the placement of specific ads next to specific kinds of text, humorous or ironic or maybe tragic at times. It can be between the images from two different papers from the same day, the different ways in which the same things are portrayed.
For my own project I was very inspired by the work of Sarah Charlesworth – specifically her Modern History and Movie-Television-News-History series – and her consideration of the role of images within newspapers and between multiple papers. I chose to clip images from four different Valentine’s Day newspaper issues and reinterpret them based only on the visual. I re-ordered them into a physical sketchbook, scanned these pages, and then printed them quite large. These prints include the edges of the sketchbook, not only the images, as a recognition of my altering the images. I think it is interesting to consider these images so fully out of context, to think of what they could possibly have been illustrating – what latent meaning do they hold that we (as the viewer) have no record of? I kept no record of where each image came from quite intentionally.