Rhubarb pie, Knut Hamsun, Herbie, Daleks and other absurdities
So what have rhubarb pie, a Norwegian novelist, a car with a mind of its own and the arch enemies of Doctor Who all have in common? Well…in one way nothing at all…and in another way…absolutely everything. Within each of us resides a murky alphabet soup of pop culture, inspirations, tastes, fear and loathing. And it’s into this subconscious soup that we lower down our ladles, draw it back up to our mouths and spew out the undignified remains whether they make any sense or not.
Which is to say ask not from where inspiration springs – just catch hold and hang on for the ride of your life.
In addition to photography I’ve worked as a graphic designer for many years. Most of the work that I do is commercial: corporate, advertising and business to business. It’s seldom that I do any creative graphic design for myself and for the hell of it. So, for a change, I set myself the challenge of designing one poster per day for a month. A selection of the results are shown below.
First up is a quote from one of my favourite writers – the Norwegian author Knut Hamsun – from his novel ‘Pan‘. The background here is taken from a statue that I photographed in a museum.
The following poster seems like a surreal mix of harsh germanic lettering used to illustrate a mundane pie recipe. This juxtaposition is intended here but the contrast is purely from a British perspective. Because, if you’re German, it’s not so strange after all when you consider the history of black-letter text and realise that this intense and difficult to read typeface was still being used to typeset books and novels well into the 20th century.
I’ve occasionally been known to pick up a pen or pencil and start drawing freehand. Given another lifetime I’d dedicate myself to it and become an illustrator. Here’s a short comic strip called ‘Things That Scared Me Growing Up‘. It’s all true.
The picture of the owl drawn around the light switch is just something that occurred to me after zoning out and staring at the light switch for I don’t know how long – as you do. And next to that I’ve dredged up another childhood memory. I was messing about drawing a stylised butterfly when the Herbie concept slowly dawned on me.
The next two ideas incorporate photography again. The Hunter’s Prayer text is something that I added to an existing image that I took in Copenhagen and the other Knut Hamsun quote I went out especially to take a photograph to accompany this. This proved more troublesome than expected. I had the idea that I could find a broken umbrella discarded by the side of the road so I went out looking for one. Half an hour later I was using a stick trying to cajole an umbrella up and over a high fence where it had been thrown slightly out of reach – not easy. In the end I found a couple of umbrellas and took them home to photograph. I didn’t end up using a terribly broken or distressed umbrella. I just turned one of the umbrellas upside down and saw a kind of fairy tale city or Chinese Wall in the sweeping folds and went with that to go along with the quote which was taken from Hamsun’s novel ‘Mysteries‘.
Finally I’ve used a simple quote by Nell-lynn Perera in an almost purely typographical treatment where the removal and positioning of the keyword is removed from it’s original context at the head of the quote and placed at the back while still maintaining the sense of the quote.