AboutDocumentary & portraiture photography
Image and text:
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Advanced Part 4 of 5
The essence of writing is legibility. Words are signs that enable us to communicate ideas with other people across the distance of time and space. They form a function, in a literal sense, and a visual sense - the font, type size and weight of the words all contribute to emphasis and subtle changes in meaning. Our legacy is the Roman lettering; the history of lettering in our time is based on the styles and conventions introduced by the Romans. With the formation of the printing press, the emphasis shifted from hand lettering in special books, to one of functional design of pages. The letters that once were works of art in themselves, giving detailed emphasis in hand written texts that were communal and central to the few institutions in early communities, became a tool in a job of mass reproduction. This is no subtle difference, the monk with a lifetime dedicated to copying one book in immaculate detail, compared with the printer, using a selection of types available for his press.
By the 1860's, book printing began to use ideas about creating atmosphere on a page using different letters and styles, incorporating them into pictorial designs, mimicking those of the later Middle Ages, as evidenced by the fixation with Gothic letter forms of the period. The art of lettering was introduced to schools of design in Vienna, Paris, Munich, London and Berlin. The new discipline was pioneered by two teachers, Rudolf von Larisch in Berlin, and Edward Johnston in London. Art Nouveau examined the possibilities of letter construction. In this period, art was becoming broken down and included in all aspects of life. Design began to have great importance, and artists took time to craft text for works involving their greater art.
The conflict between this representational lettering and artistic lettering came to a head in the Dada movement, begun in Zurich in 1917. They abhorred letters (the normal means of communication between layers of conventional society) and used them as a means of attack. The chaos of typefaces in the magazine, Dada, was a means of illustrating their message. Letters were also already a significant element in the surrealist vocabulary, with single letters and fragments of text from external sources appearing in cubist paintings and collage.
By the end of the first world war, the letter had been freed from the context of conventional layout, and had become a medium used by the Constructivist and Bauhaus movements as a design tool, an icon. The Constructivists made unique patterns out of letters, altering the size, weight and orientation of the letters, treating them as components in their art work which mirrored the components that formed the new machine age. Two famous designers were Piet Zwart and El Lissitzky, both of whom used photography and letters as components in collage and poster designs. This modern approach gradually transplanted the Romanesque schools such a Johnston’s in London, and became part of mainstream design until this day. The letter had been modernized, and liberated, given an inherent power of its own as a graphic symbol - a modern idiom, the source of today’s logo.
Within the closed frame, we have seen how relationships between words and image can be constructed. In the preceding examples, the narratives are directly influenced by this combination, and the success of the narrative relies on the successful combination of the two graphic elements in collusion.
Where this has come up short, a gap is left in the narrative which we have the opportunity to fill, or to ignore, depending on our response to the work.
Historically, some words have always been singled out and illustrated visually as titles, and thus a device to entice the reader into the work. The evaluation of the work of artists described earlier shows the mechanisms surrounding this attempt to entice, and their relative success or failure.
© John Frederick Anderson