This photo taken by Nick Knight for a series titled ‘skinhead’ shows two young people with their heads shaved or partly shaved to be a “skinhead”. This was a part of a subculture in the late 60’s in London which later grew worldwide in the 1980’s, motivated by it being something that wasn’t in the mainstream. Knight photographed this culture movement and created a book from it (1994) to reveal the people involved with the subculture, in particular showing how they dress as part of a fashion photography series. The book captures their behaviour, fashion and their attitudes towards the police, government and school.

http://showstudio.com/project/nick_knight_image/skinheads

The piece above is by the street artist, illustrator and graphic designer Shepard Fairey. When creating his pieces, he very heavily uses stencils and layers to deconstruct the image into a select palette of colours of usually red, black and either a pale yellow or white. Deconstruction is something very typical in the field of graphic design and illustration as it allows us as designers to create new shapes from images like the one above Shepard has created. Through my own practice this can also be achieved through typography to give the text depth and perhaps emphasize the meaning of the text. When fairey creates his work, he uses limited colours and keeps his work consistent to show which colours are the foreground and background.

Mujer Fatale Offset

Roy Liechtenstein’s work is often considered postmodern as it includes features of modernism, full of colour and shapes and heavily using primary colours, focusing on foreground and background details. Post modernism is shown through subverting something away from its original purpose to help us understand it more. Roy’s work shows this through this piece above as showing a scene of a woman however he uses different shapes to create texture and create a sense of misdirection of the piece’ meaning and show the painting for what it is. Through my own practice I can apply this way of thinking when creating images to show what the piece is as an object and make the audience question the meaning of it.

http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-postmodern-art.htm#pop-art-in-the-style-of-roy-lichtenstein