The work initially addresses a text by David Levi-Strauss entitled, ‘A Sea of Griefs is Not a Proscenium’ which discusses the projects of Alfredo Jaar and the Rwandan genocide in 1994. This text created interest in looking into the purpose of news and the way it can constantly provide information and imagery into people’s lives. This triggered the recognition of the way a reader can distance themselves from reality and how the subject can become a spectacle.
In terms of control and reading news, the work suggests how there is a certain amount of power and restraint a reader of news can feel when being distanced from the subject and not having to confront it. Focusing on exploring newspapers specifically as a source of distributing news and considering the action of reading news, reading is silent and independent, which reinforces the idea of the way a reader is not necessarily expected to speak about what they read. This silence of reading reflects a voyeur’s position of being anonymous and detached. The work reflects how society receives and processes news.
Whilst researching photojournalism and documentary photography and being aware of language’s fundamental importance within these subjects, the artist has chosen to study and explore the use of text in connection with image in greater detail.
Attention was paid to photomontage and the experimentation of combining collected news articles and images. The repetition of the newspaper portraits suggests the constant overlapping flow of the news and the text (a quote taken from David Levi-Strauss’s chapter), is cut through the mouth and the centre of the image emphasizing the silence of reading and completing the statement of the piece.
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