Four magazines about one (fictional) person each based on several people. Balance between text (fake interviews, essays) and photos (documentary style fashion-inspired shoots).
Topic:
Each magazine has its own topic, e.g. ‘depressed’ and ‘food coma’. Because the magazine’s content is built on information of a group of people, it can be seen as the exploration of the topics it brings forward.
Main thesis:
By nature of the approach, there is no main thesis. On a meta-level one could say that the magazines offer us another way of thinking and making in the area of social life and style. Style tools that fashion magazines apply are used to explore social life, demonstrating that the two are strongly connected and intertwined. The implicit suggestion is we should look for ways to express these hybrid forms of social life and style.
Format:
A combination of staged photography that looks documentary and essays that are based on interviews with people about how they deal with the topic of the magazine issue, such as ‘depressed’ or ‘food coma’. This is all not academic, but it is not journalistic either. It is more ‘creative’ and could be close to design research. At least it is inspirational to design research.
Methodology:
Essential to the approach is to involve professional photographers and writers as a magazine would do, but (judging from the results) give them briefs that are much more open and push them to do something out of the ordinary while focusing on situations and stories that are generally too mundane for magazines. Furthermore these publications are treated as proper magazines, also in how they are distributed and sold. It has been picked up by the international art crowd as graphic design art too however.
Link:
Re-magazine website, in particular issues 10-13 (13 is not on the site but we have a copy, just as of 10-12).
Relevance:
This is an in-between project that takes an unusual medium (magazines) for doing and publishing social research. Our project also in such an in-between position and needs to find ways to express this. Re-Magazine is an inspirational reference for this.