On visual quotations and clichés

ILLUSTRATIONS CAN PARAPHRASE other pictures. Pictures which the audience is supposed to know and recognize. You can produce powerful visual communication when standing on the shoulders of those who created iconic images, like this famous photo from World War II:

THAT THE IWO JIMA PHOTOGRAPH carries a lot of symbolism is beyond discussion. Over the years, a common agreement has been established as to what it communicates, almost turning this image into a statement. Thereby, using the Iwo Jima composition as the basis for a new illustration will provide you with an obvious advantage: Part of the story has already been told and memorized.
You can put a layer of new information on top of the old one. And if your analogy is appropriate, the humouristic aspect which paraphrases often contain can further reinforce the message.

HOWEVER, as the very nature of iconic images is that just about everybody knows them, there is a risk that just about everybody will use them. Which might gradually turn these new illustrations into visual clichés.

ANOTHER ASPECT for you to consider: Can we be sure that people will actually recognize the original image which we are paraphrasing? With the Iwo Jima photo, that is something you will hardly have to worry about. But as a media professional, you should keep in mind that your frame of reference is much broader and much more diverse than that of your average reader/viewer/user. You have seen – and probably thought about – a lot more images than your audience has.

THIS MORNING, I was confronted with a front page illustration which I had no idea was a visual quotation, as I had completely forgotten about the original.
Consequently, I was puzzled … as it is a very strange illustration.

TO MAKE THINGS WORSE, the paper did not even help me with a headline that might have led my thoughts on the right track. The meaning for which I was searching had been stowed away in the very last sentence of the caption: Information’s top story is about a new kind of trafficking, male workers who are being traded for forced labour.
When I realized this, I thought, what a ridiculous, dysfunctional way to illustrate that story! Five men (who might very well be members of the Information editorial staff) lying in fetal position and photoshopped into something that should probably have resembled a pack of meat but looks more like a wrapped condom. The notion of slave labour was pretty far away, to put it mildly.

I THOUGHT THIS IDEA STUNK so badly that I had to show the page to a group of copy editors who had applied for my Magazine and Feature Layout workshop at the Danish School of Media & Journalism. They were just as mystified as I had been, and we all agreed that this illustration did not work at all.
However, after a minute or two, one of the sixteen people began wondering aloud. The image vaguely reminded him of something. And a quick Google Image search on the word trafficking solved the puzzle:

INFORMATION was paraphrasing an advertisement from a three-year-old campaign against trafficking. The original illustration is great – much more professionally executed than today’s copy, and helped along the way by the fact that naked women put closely together in a plastic wrapping look a lot more like tiger prawns than fully-clothed male journalists can ever resemble raw meat, or whatever they were supposed to look like.

OK, ENOUGH of dissing Information – a paper which should in fact be praised for constantly experimenting with visual communication, and for succeeding much more often than it fails. My point is a different, more general one:
Visual quotations are great communication tools. Beware, however, of two pitfalls:
1) If people are exposed to an image too often, it may develop into a visual cliché. And
2) If people do not understand what you are quoting, they probably won’t understand what you are trying to say.

White space: Good taste, bad design

SINCE FEBRUARY 2011, Berlingske Tidende have been using a new design for their website (which, at the same time, changed its address to B.dk). The new design concept implies a generous use of white space.
In the Big Old Book of Good Taste in Graphic Design, white space is doubleplusgood.
But that book was written before the internet. And here you see what lots of white space may lead to – on a website:

OF COURSE, the white space policy is only one of the reasons why today’s B.dk completely falls apart.
Another part of the explanation is that Berlingske – like a lot of other newspapers around the world, worrying about how to make money in the media landscape of tomorrow – has decided to allow advertising on every available square millimeter of the computer screen.

THE RESULT IS DREADFULLY UGLY and confusing … and apparently, it does not even represent a viable business model. According to a recent Poynter study, ”clickthrough rates on banners are lower than low – 0.1 percent to 0.04 percent by various measures”.
 
WHO KNOWS, perhaps one day even advertisers will find out about this. And hopefully by then, more meaningful and visually appealing ways of distributing the limited screen space between commercial and editorial content will emerge and, eventually, prevail.
Until then, I guess we will have to live with sites like B.dk … or go somewhere else.

Reality sucks

WE HAVE A NEW RENTER. Maj and I now have the privilege of sharing our premises with not only Rasmus and Wolfgang, the men behind The Potential Project, but also with Susanne and Snæbjörn who are running a successful little book publishing company by the name of Hr. Ferdinand.

NOW WHY DO I TELL YOU THIS? Well, you see, today Snæbjörn was portrayed in the PLEASURE section of the newspaper Børsen. And we were all pretty surprised when we saw the magazine front page, as well as the seven inside pages devoted to this story.
Not so much because of the words – they form a loyal and interesting description of an interesting man. But having come to know Snæbjörn as a warm, kind, and very relaxed person, we were wondering why this photographer had chosen to portray him as … no, I think I’ll leave it up to you to judge what kind of impression Snæbjörn leaves on these pictures.

THE MAIN HEADLINE SAYS ”A Nose For Books”.
Well, yes … Snæbjörn has a nose, and he certainly works with books. Usually does not carry them out into cornfields, however.

ON THE FOLLOWING PAGE, someone has poured a lot of water over Snæbjörn.
By the way, the clothes he’s wearing look suspiciously different from his ordinary wardrobe … and not just because they are wet.
The caption says: ”Best-selling books are not always pieces of art. Many are journalistic stories. But sales and art can easily co-exist’, Snæbjörn says, mentioning the Japanese author Haruki Murakami as an example”.
OK, now I understand why he is soaking wet …?

HOWEVER, ON THE NEXT SPREAD he is even wetter. Caption: ”The publisher behind Hr. Ferdinand is the son of an art-loving priest. ’I was raised with a great passion for music and inspiration from culture. My dad always wrote his preachings listening to Bach’, Snæbjörn Arngrimsson says”.
In case you are wondering about the swimming pool, you’re not alone.
Snæbjörn wonders, too. ”But perhaps the photographer heard the old anecdote – not true, but anyway – about me meeting Dan Brown in a swimming pool in Slovenia, leading to our contract for The Da Vinci Code”, he guesses, exerting his open-mindedness.

LAST PAGE, last photo.

And this is what Snæbjörn looks like in real life:

SO WHAT’S MY POINT? Well, it looks as if the challenge of trying to understand the true personality of an interesting, intelligent, kind, many-facetted, successful man, and trying to visually convey this broad variety of human qualities to Børsen’s readers, does not appeal to our man behind the camera.
He seems to find it much more stimulating to make up entirely his own story.
Following that ambition, the ”photo artist” ignores two facts which I (contrary to him, apparently) find important:
1) In no way do these photographs relate to the story. And
2) In no way are they reflecting the actual human being which they were supposed to portray.

BUT WHAT THE HECK: Reality sucks, anyway.
Let’s make it all up.

TV from hell

ON SEPTEMBER 15, the Danes are going to elect a new parliament. The election date was announced as late as Friday, leaving only twenty days for our media to revel in polls and pundits. Maybe that is why Danish TV now invites me to watch 200-or-so videos at the same time?

AT THE START OF THE SHOW, the anchor, Kim Bildsøe Lassen, commented on his new wall-of-images with great excitement: ”Here you will be able to see everything that happens during the election campaign”. But of course I won’t. The only thing I can see is that something is happening. For all I know, they could show mud boxing or synchronized swimming on every third screen and I wouldn’t notice.

THE BIG MAP is supposed to reveal where in our country (which, as you probably know, is huge) the top candidates will be on any given time or day. On this first evening, apparently everyone was in Copenhagen as that was where the opening TV debate was held.

LUCKILY ENOUGH, the screens are pretty small and the images generally quite blurred so normal people will make no attempts to decode them. If they tried, they would probably miss most of what was said (and then again, you can discuss how great a disaster that would be).
So, obviously, the reason for producing and broadcasting this abundance of moving images is not that DR expects anyone to actually try to follow them. The point is only to show that ”a hell of a lot is happening”. Please God, let us not be boring.

You can check out Kandidaterne yourself on http://www.dr.dk/nu/player/#/valg-2011/16453

One idea is better than two

IN THE VERY SAME WEEK as TIME Magazine announced ”THE DECLINE AND FALL OF EUROPE” on their cover, the Danish newspaper Information ran this article about everything going wrong in the USA. The headline says ”United States of America – a failed state”.
Are western media playing some variety of ”pass the monkey” these critical days?
Anyway, what caught my attention was the page design. It exemplifies a mistake often made by creative people working in the communication business: Instead of trying to control their own creativity with a specific purpose, they seem to allow it to flow freely, letting everything out.

I DON’T KNOW how many people were involved in this page design. Maybe just one person. Most likely, one individual got the idea of using the photo of a poor, lonesome, frightened New Orleans kid in the aftermaths of the 2005 Katrina hurricane as a metaphor for the overall situation of the United States of America. Rather tendentious, you might say, but not a bad idea, and quite a strong photograph.

BUT THEN a second idea enters the stage. You can almost hear someone suggesting, enthusiastically: ”Now what if we wrote UNITED STATES OF AMERICA with stars-and-stripes-letters?”. Yeah, great thinking, let’s do it, the whole newsdesk responds.
Consequently, a lot of effort has been put into designing a stars-and-stripes headline. And this is where it all went wrong.
Because now when I – the reader – open the centrefold, my attention gets divided. Half of me wants to look at the colorful headline and the other half tries to concentrate on the photo – which, thereby, loses just about half of its impact.
The final result is a story that works OK, but no more than that. And that is a shame, as considerable resources were obviously devoted to both contents and presentation.

SEE HOW MUCH MORE POWERFUL this spread could have been if only the editor/designer had managed to restrain his/her creativity and trust the photograph to do the job of grabbing the reader’s attention and visualizing the essence of the story:

IN OTHER WORDS: One idea is better than two!

(and of course, the second idea – the stars-and-stripes-headline – ought to be memorized and eventually used for another story. Because, even though it may seem – is, in fact – a bit obvious, this is a trick that has worked before and will no doubt do it again …)

Morsom mobning – uklar kommunikation

GANSKE SOM Politikens tegner Roald Als anvender faste rollefigurer i sine tegninger – Anders Fogh som hulemand, Pia Kjærsgaard i muddergrøften – har Ekstra Bladet for vane at etablere øgenavne og bruge dem konsekvent, hver gang de pågældende personer omtales. Ofte er det vældig underholdende, selv om det samtidig giver ubehagelige mindelser om skolegården og de stakler, der i årevis måtte trækkes med prædikater som ”Fessor”, ”Tykke” osv.
Godt det ikke er mig det går ud over, tænker man – endnu en gang.

AT UDNÆVNE SVERIGES MONARK til ”stripperkonge” er unægtelig også morsomt, fordi det på en herligt respektløs – og typisk Ekstrabladsk – måde minder os om Carl Gustavs uortodokse og meget omtalte måde at bruge de svenske skatteyderes penge på, og samtidig genopfrisker navnet på en populær tv-serie.
Men når Ekstrabladet.dk går ud fra at øgenavnet er så indarbejdet, at vi umiddelbart vil forstå at det er Carl Gustav der sigtes til når de skriver ”stripperkongen” i en rubrik, overvurderer nyhedssitet måske sin egen betydning som fælles referenceramme:

UNDERTEGNEDE var ihvertfald forvirret i ganske lang tid før sagens rette sammenhæng gik op for mig. Og måtte igennem adskillige fejlræsonnementer såsom: ”Jamen de har da ikke engang fået børn sammen endnu, hvordan kan Daniel så blive morfar?” og ”Han kan da umuligt blive morfar, det må da være farfar …” før det gik op for mig at fotografiet ikke forestiller ”stripperkongen” men dennes svigersøn.
 
MED ANDRE ORD, et billede af Victoria sammen med sin far ville have gjort underværker for den visuelle kommunikation.
Keep it simple, stupid.

Explaining goodness

USUALLY, IT IS SO MUCH EASIER to describe why something is bad than why something is good.

This photographic portrait from today’s Berlingske Tidende inspired me to make an attempt pointing out the particular qualities which make this a great photograph.

AT FIRST GLANCE, the photo simply follows fashion with its black-and-white aesthetics and it also contains quite a few of the features which we often see used as clichés in contemporary press photography, and which I have been criticizing in earlier blogposts (in Danish; my apologies to eventual readers from countries outside Scandinavia).

Focusing on a mirror image is something we see all the time, just like the large out-of-focus area and the quite small part of the photograph which actually shows the motif: A man who is suffering from impotence after a prostate cancer surgery.

BUT THIS PHOTO is not a cliché. Far from it. And why is that?

Because the abovementioned features all serve their purposes. The very topic of the reportage is how men in this kind of situation are seeing themselves, hence the mirror. The man’s nakedness suggests sexuality, another key issue of the story, without any pornographic hints whatsoever; his dignity remains unharmed.

His eyes are extremely expressive, maybe the highlight of this photograph. But the view of the man from behind adds something more to our impression of him, it is not just the symptom of superficial artsiness which you might suspect. Seeing a human body from that angle will inspire the viewer to associate to age, health, weakness; other things that are all very relevant to this story.

TO DRAW A CONCLUSION, this is a very successful photograph. In its own right and, even more, because it adds so much to the story. Words and visuals are going hand in hand.

It would be interesting to learn how the photographer, Christian Als, had been briefed for this assignment and how he was working together with the reporter, Cecilie Gormsen.