Summative Statement

I began my practical project by drawing directly from celebrity tabloid magazines. I was doing this through fascination with the content, as it seemed so loud and garish and completely inappropriate in every way and it seemed amazing to me that they were just allowed to exist with no questions asked. They seemed sinister and manipulative in some way, as if to lead the audience quite ham-fistedly to certain points of view. At first for my essay I wanted to explore this, the manipulative visual and linguistic devices these magazines used to achieve and keep their readership,  but research revealed they were struggling to as a result of the internet. I wondered how this kind of news still exists in a physical form when all the content was available for free online, which became the new focus for my essay, how lifestyle magazines, as a broader category, remain in print and compete with digital news. I looked into drawing the aesthetic of other lifestyle magazines but decided to focus on just the trashy ones because they made a stronger image. My aims with the drawings were to demonstrate the unethical and unfair nature of the journalism in celebrity tabloids, by recreating their aesthetic to a hellish degree and focusing on statements made and images printed in the magazines that are lost to the din of yellow journalism. By rearranging the information into categories and making the trashy, throw-away aesthetic I have tried to highlight the evils I see in the magazines with a hope to communicate them to their readers and ignorers, and raise quesitons about whether this invasive nature of reporting is an acceptable and humane process to subject people to.