Tuesday 19 February 2008

Another Step Closer to Reality


I'm dusting off some vintage graphics for a vinyl box set of the early '80s NE recordings that's coming out shortly. When I say "graphics", I mean a lot of cut & pasted images snipped out of magazines and tatty black and white photocopies. It was progressive political pornography I was doing back then.

The original of this particular image was a collage clipped from the Sunday magazines then made into a dozen A3 photocopies,courtesy of a friend who had an office job with British Gas. It was used as a pull-out in Rock Wilson's Apocalypso A Go Go 'zine, and I also saw it recycled in the situationist-inspired 'zine Anti-Clockwise.

I never had access to Photoshop back in the day. Or should I say, “the means of production of this type of imagery was under much tighter control by the military industrial complex”? Or should I say Photoshop hadn't been invented yet?

Any which way, I never got to do this picture in colour before. It's nice to be able to re-shape monochromatic photocopies into something like how I imagined they should have looked.

1 comment:

Planet Dada said...

Aaah, the all-pervasive xerox machine, I wonder if they realised just what kind of underground revolution they were starting! I think Adobe's early association with Apple is probably what put Photoshop out of most people's reach - afterall, Lucas and Co. were using it for the original lightsabre touches back in the day at ILM so there was little hope for the us mere mortals until about version 4/5 !