Digital Witness: Revolutions in Design, Photography, and Film
Edited by Britt Salvesen, Staci Steinberger, with Christianne Hanych
Contributions by Kim Beil, Hye Jean Chung, Carolyn L. Kane, Briar Levit, Britt Salvesen, Staci Steinberger, Anuradha Vikram, David Fincher, Copper Frances Giloth, April Greiman, MANUAL, LaJuné McMillian, Rosa Menkman, Bert Monroy, Casey Reas, Thomas Ruff, Kyuha Shim, Raqi Syed, and Cesar Velazquez
Designed by Content Object: Kimberly Varella, Art Direction and Design; Gabrielle Pulgar, Production Designer
Casebound Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and DelMonico Books, 2024
ISBN: 978-1-63681-133-8
Dimensions: 9 × 12 in.
Separations: Echelon, Los Angeles
Photoshop has changed the way we see the world between news and social media, thousands of images pass before our eyes everyday. There is an underlying code that goes mainly undetected by the mainstream: colorspace. As in: CMYK or RGB. Many of the images reproduced for Digital Witness live in an RGB world and each file is laden with meta code (pixels, location, owner, device, etc.). For book production these images had to be transformed to a limited gamut of CMYK in order to be printed.
This casebound hardcover is harnessed to make the reader aware of these color spaces using a palette that is overtly obvious: Red cover, blue endpapers, green fore edges. The red and the blues are lousy CMYK interpretations, however the PMS green sings with its phosphorescent ink particles and finds it's way through the pages in the footnotes (meta data), and fully flooded section dividers, title pages, and a chronology that goes back to the '80s where much of it started.
The title treatment stems from the beautifully lossy typeface LoRes 12 (Emigre Fonts), fragmented pixels breaking the letterforms in a crude grid, images bursting forth. Paired with Favorit (Dinamo) and America (Grilli Type) the type itself tells a story types journey from one of the first digital typefaces to two very contemporary ones.
The back cover "blurb" spells out the meta data of the book itself including title, editors, contributors, page count, orientation, file type, file name, file size, typefaces, designer, and publisher.
