Cosmic Migration
This week on the Granta blog, the magazine’s artistic director Michael Salu reveals the thought process behind his latest cover design.
Aliens.
It’s difficult to find a more loaded word in the last sixty or so years of popular culture. Everything we publish in the magazine beams in from a variety of angles and is weaved together delicately by our quarterly themes. Issue 114, ‘Aliens’, was no different. The words – perennially dressed in the Plantin typeface – that lay on the pages within speak to universal notions of alienation, displacement, identity and diaspora. As the pages began to fill, the cover deadline loomed on the horizon.
alienPronunciation:/ˈeɪlɪən/
adjective
1. belonging to a foreign country: an alien culture
(of a plant or animal species) introduced from another country and later naturalized
2. unfamiliar and disturbing or distasteful: principles that are alien to them; they found the world of further education a little alien
3. supposedly from another world; extraterrestrial
From Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Photo © Alberto Racatumba
So how does one set about designing a cover for Granta’s Aliens issue? I was initially adamant about avoiding blunt sci-fi references. Taken together, the pieces were all very much about a three-dimensional ‘us’ – no traditional sci-fi to be seen. I mulled it over a little more, and it seemed to make sense to mine the vast quarry of sci-fi ephemera that lives in my memory – and then to invert it.
© Thomas Duchniki
The advent of the moving image at the dawn of the twentieth century reflected the human desire to make progress, to go forwards. The ultimate fantasy lies ahead – or in the case of films like Metropolis, it acts as an allegory for our own times. That urge to look both into the future and deep within ourselves is ever-present in our visual culture. I grew up absorbing images conjured up from the imaginations of Alfred Hitchcock, Andrei Tarkovsky, Stanley Kubrick, Philip K. Dick, George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg … and Parliament Funkadelic.
Thinking broadly about dislocation and alienation was a trigger to consider what connects us. What unites us all? Our biological make-up? The human body – both physiologically and psychologically – has been ubiquitous in science fiction.
Our methods of recording biological data visually evoke that ‘other’ ... Science fiction makes use of this, playing on science fact.
In addition to my own planning, I attended an enlightening lecture on genealogy given by Henry Louis Gates – at the Iniva gallery in East London – which got me thinking more about a collective DNA, our economic or geographic groupings and migration.
From ‘Rotoreliefs’ by Marcel Duchamp
This is always a meandering process. Migration then got me thinking about somehow creating a kinetic image. A way of illustrating collective movement and displacement.
Magnetic fields! An interesting way to illustrate this. Albeit not the easiest to control ...
After a few attempts and with the clock ticking, I created this ‘A’. Rather gorgeous to look at, I thought, and it seemed to illustrate the fundamental concept well too. But after a cup of tea, some quick contemplation and opinions from some of the Granta team, I wondered if it was maybe too abstract for the words that appear inside ...
Raymond Depardon/Magnum Photos
There is an emotional punch in this collection of writing that required a more direct and accessible solution. A concise image that would create a more immediate connection with our readers. Raymond Depardon’s photograph had lingered in my mind after being selected by my fabulous assistant Daniela Silva for a magazine promotion a little while ago.
It spoke the right words. We all strive for solace at the end of the journey.
To use this within the cover itself, it needed a collage treatment. To accentuate the cosmic concept, the final cover image was printed on to a layer of foil, so the cover has a different expression according to the light. It all comes together to say simply, We are all Aliens.
***
* Granta 114: Aliens is now on sale. Buy it here. *
Visit the issue page over the next six weeks to see a selection of articles from the print magazine as well as daily web exclusives. To see a full listing of events around the issue – being held in England, the USA, Canada and Paris – click here.
Comments (14)
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LondonWriter
Thu Mar 03 20:23:57 GMT 2011
Wonderful. I think it's my favourite Granta cover ever.
#LizzieH
Tue Mar 15 06:47:37 GMT 2011
Theme and covered compelled me to purchase the Aliens issue, first ever Granta I've read. It's fantastic! My only question: Why are there no stories about aliens from outer space? (I'm embarrassed to say, the cover led me to believe that I was going to find UFOs inside). Are little green men not considered a literary subject? Or is it just harder to find good memoirs about flying saucers?
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