Artwork description:

This print was created in 2012 and explored the political situation of the time after the financial crash of 2008 and the subsequent aftermath, of which we are still living within. This image was lifted from a photograph seen in one of the U.K. Newspapers of a group of men looking for jobs in the window of a shop.

I explored the image due to several reasons:

1) It was an image of men looking for a job and no women were present, so I was interested in the way this photograph was used in the newspaper, putting across an underlying editorial that only men were suffering from being out of work and therefore looking for a job - which of course is untrue, yet further exemplifies the underlying and unconscious sexism within our society

2) The image is called shopping to highlight the unconscious drives imposed through a newspaper that has to sell advertising to print the paper, in-turn printing the image of men looking for work and presupposing that men 'shop' for jobs.

3) It is an etching which harks back to an earlier time where etchers created the images for the newspapers before the age of photographic print, feedback looping onto itself and the whole propagandising of images and their use to portray an editorial standpoint that has not shifted much in over many hundreds of years since the age of print.

This image is one version of a series exploring these ideas.

Materials used:

Zinc Etching in Fibre Fabriano Paper Stock

Tags:

#polemical #lookingforwork #zinc etching #shopping #men #print #printmaking #etching #newspapers #political #printing #media #editorial #sexism