Its interesting to see how the everyday is applied across a range of disciplines, from the social sciences, literature, illustration and photography. In contemporary society social media is the platform for engagement with the everyday. Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram are cyber spaces where incessant streams of everyday imagery are accessed and posted. It is a space for a thriving selfie culture! The ubiquitous becomes celebration, the banal is elevated.
Yasmin Ibrahim’s insightful paper ‘Instagramming life: banal imaging and the poetics of the everyday’ discusses this theme. Although this text deals with photography the same principles it can be applied to illustration. The ideas in this paper are interesting to my research theme as it shows how snapshots of ordinary experiences can be celebrated or viewed differently.
Ibrahim comments on the continual pursuit of capturing the everyday in today’s digital culture. The consumption and production of everyday images is incessant. Ibrahim makes the case that the constant banal imaging transforms the routine aspects of daily life into the performative. She argues that this invites ‘new forms of gaze, aestheticisation, engagement, communication, connection and immortalisation of life through the visual’ (p. 42).
In terms of my own practice this idea resonates. I’m drawn towards a visual narrative that shows life as it is, the quotidian celebrated in a body of work. Now I’ve formulated what I want to draw, my subject matter, the next question is not so much how, I have a style of drawing I’ll continue to develop, but now I’m wondering what I want to say? Something more in dept than a pretty image of an urban scape, what is it that’s relevant about the everyday?
List of Figures:
Fig.1 Instagram logo
Reference list:
Ibrahim, Y. (2015) ‘Instagramming life: banal imaging and the poetics of the everyday’, Journal of Media Practice, 16, (no. 1), pp. 42-54. Available at http://10.1080/14682753.2015.1015800 [Accessed 7th November 2015]
Eva Kelly Research & Enquiry 