Familiarity in Flyers is a series of 8 flyers that demonstrate a defiance of the core features of stock imagery through the insertion of original characters.
Stock images serve as a piece of absent-minded media that embody everyday life, but depict scenes that lack denotatitve excess and make the focal point of photos the only thing within them. To naturalize these images, stock photos have overwhelmingly centered white people, as dominant ideologies equate whiteness with normalcy. Stock photography is all around us—in advertisements, in presentations, even on vending machines—and our subconscious intake of them shapes our perception of who is considered normal.
I chose five Canva stock photos and one stock designs, adding original characters (more on them below) to the scenes in order to disrupt our typical definition of stock imagery. Then, I created realistic advertisements using these new images to promote various fake services or events, all with QR code, and (almost) all with a RUBO logo. Then, my digital studio class printed out these flyers and put them on walls throughout Drew University’s campus—in residential and dining halls, academic buildings, and the student center. The QR code leads to the a google form that asks people their experience with the flyers.
Familiarity in Flyers attempts to alert the audience’s attention to the stock images that are normally meant to be casually ignored. In highlighting the presence of colorful bodies in contrast with many white figures, I hope to bring attention to the lack of racial representation within stock images and how this problem influences our perceptions without realizing it.
Original Characters
For my Digital Imaging final project, I created six portraits of original characters in conjunction with a concept for a cartoon tv show: Arbortoria.
The Royal Family: King Borealis, Queen Eleanora, & Prince Solomon
The Royal Servants: Wencel the Wet, Wella the Wet, & Devin Itleywood (three squirrels in a tree trunk)
Each episode has an A plot and a B plot. The A Plot shows the Royal Family having to deal with the stresses of ruling the land of Arbortoria. The B plot follows the Royal Servants in a silent film comedic style as they try to get away with various hijinks around the castle.
These images are a glimpse into the final scene of what would be an episode I call “Royal Portrait Day”. While the family struggles to keep their outfits and props pristine, Wencel, Wella, and Devin do anything they can to have their portraits painted.
