This photograph was discovered on a digital "roll" on my FujiFilm Digital Camera in June 2008. I wasn't the photographer and I'm not sure who was. That's a mystery. It has been sitting on my memory-chip and in my mind since I made the discovery. This photo, which I have dubbed 'Horizontal Motion', ignites many questions for me. For starters, what is Horizontal Motion? I may need more context.
In the center of the photograph, beside Horizontal Motion, the word Helvetica is clearly marked on the page. That's a font! Below that piece of text the words italic, roman, and lowercase letters are written with ink. Yes! I believe this to be a photograph of a book about typography. It's a book about text. And what do I know of typography?
Eva Brumberger in "The Rhetoric of Typography" notes that typography "occupies a place that is simultaneously verbal and visual" (13). In a sense, we might understand the photo as a reiteration of this simultaneity. Because it is a photograph it's primarily visual but it contains a verbal element in the text. What is this significance of this transformation (or translocation) of a paper text into a digital text/ digital photograph? Besides the obvious meta consequences (it is a text about text, afterall), what can be said of the new format? Does it remain a text? Is it available to criticism? Is this an example of digital writing, or is it a piece of web art?
I have never seen the hard-copy of the text, only the photograph therefore it can only be viewed on a screen... I suppose I could print it off, but this might cause some sort of postmodern catastrophe. Post-Post Modernism? Double Post Modern? Do-Po-Mo? No. We can't go there. I'm just beginning to grasp the concept of the single Post and I'm not even entirely certain about Modernism. I won't enter this discussion but I will point out that the Modern period marked high times for the study of typography, and is occasionally referred to as the"typographic renaissance". Both Helvetica and Times New Roman were introduced in the 2oth century. Graphic Design also took on a new importance during modernism- Beatrice Warde published The Crystal Goblet in 1955. But to be honest, the only question that truly concerns me is What is Horizontal Motion?
I suppose we might say that horizontal motion is the movement along a horizontal plane. If you're reading this than you are involved in horizontal motion right now. Your eyes have moved from left to right, skipping down at the end of each line (unless you suffer from a certain variation of dyslexia). In a sense, this movement from left to right is what we call reading. However, it has been observed that when a child is too young to read, they associate the movement of the eyes as reading. They will move their eyes across the page, left to right, and they consider that movement to be reading. "Look Ma, I'm reading!" Most of us wouldn't consider this reading. Darn kids! But it seems we've lost our way again.
Returning to "The Rhetoric of Typography", Brumberger points out that "most contemporary designers now approach design from the perspective that a reader interacts with a document- with both its verbal and its visual content- to make meaning" (14). I think this nearly answers our question, or rather it sums up the process of our search for meaning. As we have interacted with both the visual content and verbal content of the photograph, we have gathered some understanding of the piece.
Personally, I find typography fascinating. To my mind, typesetting resembles art curation. A page and the physical/visual aspects of that space, like the walls of a gallery, facilitates the narrative. McLuhan urged us to consider the spaces surrounding the box- if we understand the subject of the text as "inside the box" we might consider the "object" of the text (typography) as "outside the box". Moreover, it is important to recognize that the object of text might have a subject and narrative of its own.
