Friday 30/03/12

My plan for the next week or so is to gather all the information I have on the "Typical Englishman" such as typographic elements, photographs, labels etc and organise them into my sketchbook to create some sort of image-based message that I can then use to make a more graphic illustration.

I then plan to move forward from that and look at how I can use these elements on created backgrounds like Michelle Thompson:

 

Decision more or less made that I am gonna be looking into the 'stereotypical englishman', including things such as Tea and Toast, Fish and Chips, Wimbledon, Pub, The Mini, Caravans/Camping, Telephone Box, Police etc.
And designing this in my own way.

(Britain Yesterday & Today - Janice Anderson & Edmund Swinglehurst)

"Everyone's trying to be someone they're not"

This is a quote I could use for one of my stereotypes, as it is often something I see a lot in people..

Anyway, true or not, it's still interesting.

A good artist for this would be John Stezaker:

The idea is that people are hiding behind a front plenty of the time - masking who they really are

if the last part was unclear...

.. what i meant was that i can use the imagery of "the typical englishman" by setting out and taking my own photographs that I could then later use in my designing.

Martin Parr - Signs of the Times

To create his bookSigns of the Times: A Portrait of the Nation's Tastes. (1992), Parr entered ordinary people's homes and took pictures of the mundane aspects of his hosts' lives, combining the images with quotes from his subjects to bring viewers uncomfortably close to them. The result of Parr's technique has been said to leave viewers with ambiguous emotional reactions, unsure whether to laugh or cry.

Biscuits

Brew

Caravan Holidays

Deck Chair/Union Jack

Granny Shopping

Old Men/Bowling

Reading Newspaper

Martin Parr set out to complete his Signs of the Times by taking photographs of strangers typical daily routines. For my theme of Stereotypes I could set out to do my own photography with the same idea. However I would then use my photography in a typically illustrative way using graphics and typography to express the specific stereotype.

Cindy Sherman - Untitled Film Stills

Sherman began making these pictures in 1977, when she was twenty-three. The first six were an experiment: fan-magazine glimpses into the life (or roles) of an imaginary blonde actress, played by Sherman herself. The photographs look like movie stills—or perhaps like publicity pix—purporting to catch the blond bombshell in unguarded moments at home.


The protagonist is shown preening in the kitchen:



and lounging in the bedroom:



On to something, Sherman tried other characters in other roles: the chic starlet at her seaside hideaway:



the luscious librarian:



the domesticated sex kitten:



Other artists had drawn upon popular culture, but Sherman's strategy was new. For her the pop-culture image was not a subject (as it had been for Walker Evans) or raw material (as it had been for Andy Warhol) but a whole artistic vocabulary, ready-made. Her film stills look and function just like the real ones—those 8-by-10-inch glossies designed to lure us into a drama we find all the more compelling because we know it is not real. 


In the Untitled Film Stills there are no Cleopatras, no ladies on trains, no women of a certain age. There are, of course, no men. The sixty-nine solitary heroines map a particular constellation of fictional femininity that took hold in postwar America—the period of Sherman's youth, and the ground-zero of our contemporary mythology. In finding a form for her own sensibility, Sherman touched a sensitive nerve in the culture at large. 


So really the inspiration I get from Sherman's work is yet another way of looking at stereotypes - I could look at the way the stereotypical celebrities act/pose/live and reinvent it into everyday life with normal people? just an idea...

STEREOTYPES

... Or something that relates to how Pop culture / Fame makes us perceive things.