Barbara Kruger Photoshop Tutorial

Andy Warhol has his Photoshop tutorial. So does Lichtenstein. So do the impressionists. It's high time Barbara Kruger be welcomed into this little Pantheon of adoring photoshop plagiar—I mean, homage tutorials.

Who is Barbara Kruger, you say? Well, she's an artist most famous for bold and confrontational work like this:
You can find the most thorough overview of her art in the Art History Archive, a nice review of her work at Swindle magazine, another good one here, and some more images on an educational site about feminism. And let's not forget the ever-popular Wikipedia entry. What? you don't want to navigate away from my wonderful blog for even a minute. Who can blame you? OK, so here's the oversimplified reductionist bio recap: Barbara Kruger uses black-and-white found photos coupled with her own pithy text (usually in white Futura Bold font on red background) to make strong statements about power, politics, gender, etc.

The article in Swindle calls her work "deceptively simple." A lovingly (we mock because we love, right?) satirical "Graphic Standards Manual" boils Kruger down to a formula. And yet, no one has (lovingly?) done a Photoshop-based tutorial on Kruger. So here goes...

The tutorial
I'd like to believe that during our politically turbulent times, Barbara Kruger wouldn't mind if a few adoring Krugerians made their own guerrilla art, hence my statement "Plagiarism is the sincerest form of imitation."

step 1.
Decide what you want to say. Don't just steal a quote. Tweak one. For example, Descartes wrote "I think, therefore I am." Kruger wrote "I shop, therefore I am." If you want to sound confrontational, try to use subject pronouns like "you" and "I" in your statement.

step 2.
Find your image, but make sure its connection to your quote has a touch of artistic ambiguity. In my case, I used a photo of the Arc de Triomphe. We usually connect plagiarism with writing, so instead I used an example of architectural plagiarism (the Parisian monument being a copy of the Roman Arch of Titus). If your image isn't in black and white, you can do a quick and dirty Image—Mode—Grayscale transform in Photoshop. (Just make sure you switch back to "RGB" mode once it's black-and-white, or you'll encounter problems later.) You can even add some grain if you like (just an option). Just remember, art isn't always pretty.

step 3.
Select the text tool and set the font to Futura Bold with faux italic selected in the character formatting palette. You can then type in your text (you will probably want to use a new text layer for each word for maximum creative freedom) and mess with the size until your militant soul is satisfied.
step 4.
Now you're ready for some Kruger red. In spite of what the Graphic Standards Manual says, I believe the correct red is R255 G0 B0, or ff0000. You can get that color by clicking on the foreground color box on your tools palette...
which will open up a dialogue box...
where you can type in my custom formula for Kruger red (ff0000).

step 5.
Now that you've got the right red, you just need to select some rectangles to house it. I suggest doing each rectangle on its own layer for each word (just in case you want to edit the type later). So in the layers palette select a "New Layer" for each word and name it to avoid confusion.
Now that you're on your "red box" layer, you can hit "M" to select the rectangular marquee tool, and then click and drag to create a rectangle around the word. Hit "G" for the paint bucket tool (your foreground color is still set to Kruger red, right?) and click in your selection to fill it with red. If your text disappears, it's because the red rectangle layer is on top of it. Just drag it below the word each time like this:
step 6.
Let's assume that you now have all your words, each with its own red rectangle underneath. Now you want to move the words/boxes around. To make this easier, you will want to link each box to its word. You can do this by selecting the two layers (word and box) while holding shift:
and then linking them with the pull-down menu from the layers palette:
Do this for each word and its box and you will be ready to move them around (with "V," the move tool) while pulling your hair out and saying "Yes, this is deceptively simple."

step 7.
Since you want the feeling of collage, you don't want everything to be too perfect. Choose a word or two (but not too many) rotate just enough to bother your obsessive compulsive friends. You can do this by selecting the layer and then bringing up the free transform handles (Mac: command-T; PC: Ctrl-T):
Grab a corner and rotate it just enough. Then, if you click on another tool you will see a dialogue box appear asking if you want to apply the transformation (you do). Once you're happy with everything, you can flatten and save. [And hey! if you do this tutorial, please post it somewhere and link back to the September Monthly Special]

step 8. (optional)
If you want to add a red box to your subversive masterpiece, you can bring up the layer style box by double clicking on the icon for your image in the layers palette and then selecting stroke. Here are the settings I used:
Make sure you click in the color box to enter the Kruger red formula. You will notice that I lowered the opacity to 90% just to bring in some of the texture from the image.

You have done it! Now proudly and defiantly display your art.
Fight the power! Make Barbara proud.

The ABCs of Paris

The Intro (be patient)
Continuing our theme this month of Text+Photo, I want to share a very special project with you. Twelve years ago, we were living in Paris. I was finishing the research for my PhD and teaching at the University of Versailles. Michelle and our year-old baby, Max, spent their days exploring the city. As a souvenir project, I worked on a series of black-and-white photos featuring the beautiful and ubiquitous wrought-iron of Paris. I soon finished the project and wanted to move on to something else. Then one day, our scary-smart baby gave me the idea...

I was playing blocks with baby Max and discovered that he had learned—without our help—the letters of the alphabet. I don't know how he managed that, but it gave me the perfect organizing principle for a new project: the time-honored tradition of the abécédaire. Remembering Victor Hugo's assertion (From Notre Dame de Paris) that "When ones knows how to see, one can find the spirit of a century and the physiognomy of a king in a door knocker," I set out to create an architectural primer on the ABCs of Paris. I photographed details of the city I love—details that resemble letters—and then later, I selected a word and quote from France's rich literary and cultural history to accompany each photo.

The project continued for years. I have done it and redone it. I have taken multiple versions of most letters. I finally made the whole thing into a mock-up of a book, using Asukabook. For me, it represents the perfect sampling of the city in an ABC book for lovers of Paris young and old. I submitted the book to Artisan books, but it didn't work. I tried Chronicle and I don't think the book made it past an intern in the mailroom (but I still love you anyway, Chronicle). Would the third time be the charm? I tried Assouline, a New York/Paris-based publisher specializing in beautiful luxury editions. Score! Or so I thought. The Manhattan office seemed to love it. Can I hold on to it and show Martine Assouline (co-founder) when she returns from Europe? Hmm. Let me think about that—Yes, of course. But no! Ultimately the dreaded We really love it, but it's not right for us at this time, response came. Finally, this July I walked into the offices of Parigramme and an elegant, polite, but blunt man told me that people just aren't buying books like this anymore. OK, if he says so I can't really argue that maybe ABC Paris would sell better than that book about the doors of Paris they put out last year.

So the project is in limbo. If you know a publisher that wants it, send them my way. Otherwise, I may end up trying to do a gallery showing, selling prints, making the whole alphabet (sans quotes, of course) into a poster...who knows?

The silver lining, however, is that I used my energy (born of frustration with the ABC project) to create take-out photo—a blog that gives me a chance to explore new ideas and themes each month. Since my ABC project combines the architectural theme from July's Monthly Special with the text theme of the September Monthly Special, I couldn't resist sharing some of my favorites:



Thoughts? Comments?

The Psychology of Typeface

If you're new to take-out photo, you may not know that every month we focus on a theme (a "Monthly Special"). The "September Monthly Special" is all about text and photography, so today I want to look at text, not its content but its form.

Look at your handwriting. How has it evolved (or in my case, devolved) over time? Did you once dot your "i"s with circles or hearts or flowers? Unless you are a 10-year-old girl, let's hope those days are over. As a professor, I see a lot of handwriting. Occasionally, a guy will have the big loopy handwriting one might associate with a young girl, or a girl will have the condensed, sloppy handwriting more typical of a guy. The disconnect we might sense between the writer and the handwriting reveals that you don't have to be a graphologist to assign meaning to how someone crosses their "t"s or loops their "y"s.

Fonts are not much different, because whether we are conscious or not of their psychological impact, we choose them and we are judged by those choices. If a student hands in a research paper written in Comic Sans (yes, it's happened) or a CK scrapbooking font (true story, I swear), I have a much harder time taking their research seriously.

Check out the use of typeface in the four examples in my photo at the top of this post:

• The Strapontin café signage looks friendly, quirky, and inviting.
• The oval sign announcing that a boulangerie is closed Sundays and Mondays is full of nostalgia and suggests that the owners are probably off in Provence on those days, going to mass, picking bunches of lavender, and carding wool before winter hits.
• On the bottom left, the little flourishes on the letters of the "Hôtel de l'Avenir"—literally "Hotel of the Future"—tell us that this is yesterday's quaint future, not some distant space age where everyone will be forced to wear unflattering unitards.
• Finally, the bottom right, from the Concord Metro station, suggests power, sophistication, and obedient conformity.

A study published in 2006 by the Software Usability Research Laboratory (SURL—Star Trek-inspired logo, anyone?) at Wichita State University tested the "personality" of 20 fonts by asking people to rate them according to lists of adjectives. Courier New, for example, was the top font for the words "conformist," "unimaginative," "dull," and "plain." What a winner. Participants described a swirly little font called "Gigi" as "creative," "exciting," and "feminine," but also "unstable," "rebel," and "impractical." Gigi sounds fun, but trust me, that girl is trouble.

A study set to appear in the October issue of Psychological Science suggests that diners are willing to pay more for food if the menu is hard to read and difficult to understand. Try the medley of berry conserves and puréed pindas on pain de mie (aka PB&J on white) It's pricey, but oh so worth it.

And if you think messing with fonts on a menu is a high-stakes game, think about the Presidential race. In March, the L.A. Times did a story on the typefaces of Obama and McCain. Obama is all about Gotham—the "it" font of 2008. Gotham is only 7 years old (Incidentally, Hillary used New Baskerville—a font with roots in the 18th century—and we see where that got her.) McCain uses Optima, the same font used in the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Coincidence? The New York Times did a great piece getting reactions to that font from various experts.

Since we're on the topic of politics, what about political t-shirts? Is it appropriate to wear a pink ringer tee with a fat and happy little pink font used to spell out "Darfur"? The New England art blog "Our Daily RED" doesn't think so. They call it a "typographically irresponsible" act.

The moral of this story, or Does this font make my butt look big?
Have I made you self-conscious of your fonts? Are you afraid that your font choices will make you look immature, naive, or even typographically irresponsible? Never fear. The studies that dissect the meanings of fonts get their information from the reactions of people like you. In other words, trust your own opinions and intuition. Catastrophically wrong font choices come from a lack of forethought. If, as the saying in typographic circles goes, fonts are the clothing that words wear, then you need to make sure your words don't get dressed in the dark. Don't let your words wear flip-flops and a t-shirt to the opera. Not unless that's the look you're going for.


Postscript
Still feeling unsure? Wish there were a What Not to Wear for font choices? Well, check back for a future post that will give you, if not Stacy and Clinton, well then, maybe their equivalents in the world of typography.

Peter "Awilo" Kithene: Hero

I wanted to try another example of a photo in text using clipping masks, so I thought of Peter—Awilo to us—who was named CNN's "Medical Marvel" hero in 2007. I did a photo session of him back in 2003 not long before he married our longtime friend, Katrina.

"Hero" is a fitting word to describe Awilo. As an orphan (at age 12) in a small Kenyan village, he not only found the strength to raise his siblings, but went on to pursue an education in order to help others. He studied pre-med and psychology at the University of Washington, but not for the purpose of building his own wealth. Instead, he devotes his time and energy to the improvement of medical care in Kenya. Along with Katrina, he founded Mama Maria—a nonprofit organization that brings needed resources to people like Awilo, people who may one day follow his example of service. Read more about Peter's remarkable life and their organization when you have a minute.

And now for a few technical comments...
You can see that a simple one word clipping mask can be very powerful. All I did was type the word "HERO" in a big font and then used the clipping mask technique explained in my Monthly Special post. I used the text formatting palette to bring the letters closer together and then I added a black background layer. That's it. Very simple and appealing. It would make a good graphic for, say, a New York Times Magazine cover story. (hint. hint. NY Times editorial board. Just a suggestion.)