Camerawork journal

The design of this journal, for Daniel Martinez’s images in his solo show at SF Camerawork, attempts to go beyond simply framing Martinez’s work, to functionally using his ideas to structure the catalogue itself. Stories are re-edited to expose ghost narratives that discuss the underlying themes of the artificial vs. real, anesthesia vs. pain, official vs. individual memory. Readers must confront their own fascination and repulsion with lurid imagery as they literally tear the uncut pages of the journal open to access the content, just as the artist appears to tear his own body in the creation of the work. Even the computer’s complicity as an agent of “the artificial” is brought to the fore, not as a cold arbiter of information but as a lost and foreign entity, haplessly witnessing the spectacle of life as production drone. The digitally stylized typography and illustrations become the computer’s doomed attempts to “draw” and become life—ASCII characters being the Pinocchios of representation, forlornly dreaming of actually being things they can only, and poorly, copy.