ALI STANCHEVA™

For my Newspaper Project I reworked the front pages of four New York Times newspapers. I wanted to emphasize the main image on the page, the image relating to the most “important” article and did so by using a sharpie to blackout everything on the page except for the image, the title of the article, and a few words relating to the title of the article. I outlined an object relating to the title of the article on the image and colored in everything outside of the outline to even bring forth an even stronger reaction by my viewer to the relation of the image and the contents of the article. I wanted the viewer to have an idea of what the article was about just by finding the connection between the object drawn on the image and the contents of the image. Some of the words that I left visible on the page belonged to unrelated articles and I did this to show how easily, if we ignore further context, it is to create our own narratives of a story.

My newspaper project was greatly inspired by artist Sara Charlesworth’s reworking of the Herald Tribune. In conversation with the artists in “The Last Newspaper,” Charlesworth spoke about her projects where she traced the Herald Tribune for one month. She reworked the newspapers to not have words and looked at the power of the images alone. What she realized is that the images on the front cover had a repeating theme: war and powerful men. These are subconscious messages that stick in our minds what we as media consumers begin to either value or respect. Imagery is an incredibly powerful tool for persuasion.