Lucy Cook designer & educator in Los Angeles

Thesis: A Graphic Designer Rethinks Photography

When technologies are evolving and the apathy, negligence, misuse, and lost passion of photography exists, how can a revival of photography take place in contemporary graphic design?

This project is a response to a kind devaluation of photography in design; the form created through the analysis of examining historical and contemporary photographers and art directors.

'I Have Returned to Find This (For the Future): A Graphic Designer Rethinks Photography,' is critical to this thesis because it explores how generated photographic imagery can exist and be appropriated within the container of the page, and coincide with graphical elements. For the body of work suspended in this medium, the designer has switched from the role of form maker to the role of art director, making decisions with the use of photography in a graphical voice.

This collection of work is a model for generating and remixing. It surrounds a practice of thinking regarding the frame and the container, pieces of ubiquity and isolating the obscure, organic elements, the geometric, and the dichotomies of controlling and letting go. What sustains my interest is being able to isolate or abstract the most beautifully nuanced and obscure properties of the photographic object, (as in kinds of materiality, lighting conditions, color studies, etc.) Through 100 explorations, poetic visualizations of nature and traces of Los Angeles surface. Among layers of conscious and unconscious decisions, what has been generated, connotes a type of poetic response to what it means to be in a moment and to come to certain acceptances of time.