Kruger Image Project - IML-501L
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The background image of this piece was taken by Rodrigo Abd for the AP in October of 2018. It captures members of the migrant caravan bound for the United States stopping to rest between Chiapas and Oaxaca while federal police temporarily halted their trek. The original photo published in color is striking, but not sinister. Brightly-hued t-shirts, backpacks, and baseball caps set off by a sunny day appear somewhat cheery and prompt the viewer\u2019s eye to settle on various clusters of people by turn \u2014 a girl in green pants resting on her father\u2019s lap, a couple in soccer jerseys stretched out face-to-face, presumably in conversation. In my Kruger-inspired project, the grey-scaled image both accentuates the severity of the migrants\u2019 situation and makes the people appear less particularized. They read as a generalized group that someone such as Melania might more seamlessly dismiss.
The image of Melania struck me as an interesting impetus for Kruger-esque design, because she is a text-image composite. Kevin Lamarque snapped this photo of the First Lady stepping into an SUV after her visit to New Hope Children\u2019s Shelter in Texas. The shelter houses more than 2,300 migrant children whose families have entered the U.S. illegally. Though notably taciturn in her role as First Lady, former super-model Melania Trump often seems to speak through fashion; her spiked heels donned en route to witness Hurricane Harvey devastation and her cream-colored outfit in the style of colonists, worn while visiting a former slave-holding facility in Ghana, incited mass speculation about visual messages. This Zara jacket prompted an unprecedented flurry of memes along with spirited defenses from Trump and White House representatives, because its text, whatever Melania\u2019s motive, undeniably engaged spectators in meaning-making. The interrogative phrasing could hardly do otherwise.
Like Kruger, I wanted to play with scale. Melania, after wearing the jacket, said she wished the media would focus more on what she does than on what she wears, but, of course, such provocative outwear shifted attention from the migrant crisis to the First Lady\u2019s fashion choice. The scale and coloration of my image exaggerates this characteristically Trump move of deflecting attention from crises with social media sensationalism.
From the outset, I was intrigued by rhetorical similarity between the jacket\u2019s phrasing and Kruger\u2019s text: both aggressively address the viewer and rely on pronouns to pack a punch. As I worked, however, I found that the jacket text made additional phrases challenging to incorporate. I eventually decided that, rather than compete with existing image-text, I needed to subvert the First Lady\u2019s jacket message by shifting impact. In homage to Kruger\u2019s pronoun play, I effected this by changing \u2018u\u2019 to \u2018you.\u2019 Melania\u2019s jacket says more about her than about observers of her attire. The more pointed \u2018you\u2019 pushes focus onto the viewer, refusing him or her the complacency of merely standing by and judging Melania.
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