THE CHILDREN OF IMAGE FAMILY
Photography, Cinema and Graphic Design are the same-aged children of Image Family in the 20th century. Though independent from each other, they interact at the same time. With an approximate age of more than a hundred years, they have grown along the technology of their century and, during their short lives, have undergone changes in their forms and conditions for many times and are going to transform in a bizarre way in the information and digital world.
Having
come from the dark room of Daguerre, the trembling screen of Lumi re
and the artistic canvas of Lautrec, they sit on the waves of
microprocessors and travel from west to east in a split second, yet by
the name of Photographs! Or they appear on monitors, in newspapers,
magazines, brochures, huge billboards, etc. by the name of Graphic
Design. Or they present the creative playful mind of the intelligent
man of today, in a compact disk with a storage capacity of eight hours
or a giant library in any home, in a corner of this global village.
These
three youngsters have found so many common grounds. What lies behind
their constant resemblance is their ability to multiply, which means
addressing the largest possible number of audiences. (Although, having
more audiences is not necessarily a sign of more success - in the field
of arts.)
These three young children, who have stepped into the
21st century, sometimes wear each other's clothes, and you wonder who
is who. Photographs appear with a graphic look, graphic designs appear
in the form of cinema, and cinema is made up of - merely moving -
photographs. Though the mother of the three is Painting, Cinema still
bears his uncles - Theater, Novels and Music - in mind. And Graphic
Design, the little sister, is going to look like Cinema, tell stories
in the multimedia, become more movable and always be accompanied by
Music. And you cannot decide if what you see on the monitor of your
computer is cinema, moving graphics or successive photography.
For
these reasons, I personally consider the three inseparable, and believe
that it is not enough to merely concentrate on the matter of
photography in graphic design, or graphic design in photography.
Cinema, along with the family of Novels, Theater and Music should also
be present at the discussion. And they are - if you like it or not.
Photography
and graphic design in Iran started with a short interval from Europe.
Their cooperation and coordination formed at the beginning of
commercial advertising in the press and inevitably appeared along with
the printing techniques of its time.
Based on the strong and
perpetual belief of man in photographs, the use of photography grew in
the production of advertising graphic design. (I have doubt if the man
of today believes as much in photography as he did before.) The graphic
designer gradually got used to benefit from photography in his works.
He found that, in order to develop an idea for advertising a product,
he could not limit his work to painting. Photography would rather be a
part of the design, too. Along advertising painters (whose names later
changed into 'graphic designers'), advertising photographers started to
work, and signs of their partnership became gradually obvious in
cultural products.
Today, advertising photographers are
graphic designers themselves who, by using a mere pencil sketch, make
excellent photographs of high quality. And graphic designers have
become expert photographers who, with the help of a few lamps and
(digital?) cameras at the side of their drawing desks, arrange their
works by themselves. And I wonder whose room will be more taken up by
computers.
But it seems that they will all become
artists-craftsmen, as their ancestors have been, who have to know both
arts and crafts. And at the end, nobody will be able to recognize the
main producer of the final product.
About this article
The above article by Ebrahim Haghighi originally
appeared in the October, 2000 issue of Jahat-e Etelae (Iranian Graphic Designers Society Newsletter) and appears with permission.
About Ebrahim Haghighi
Born in 1949, Ebrahim Haghighi began his professional activities in
different fields of graphic arts at 1970. As a renowned Iranian
designer, his works have been presented in several individual and group
exhibitions and have won numerous awards. He has also directed many 8
& 35 mm films. Since 1979, he has been teaching graphic design at:
Tehran University, Farabi University, University of art, College of
Television and Cinema, Azad University of Iran. Haghighi is a member of
the board of IGDS (Iranian Graphic Designers Society).