Christian Caujolle
Water: The Challenge

Workshop October 6–9 2009
Public lecture October 6

Download "Water: The Challenge" workshop booklet

See and download Christian Caujolle interview

Christian Caujolle is a world-renowned photojournalist, art director and curator.
He worked at the French newspaper Libération from 1978 to 1986, at first as a writer and picture editor and then as chief editor in charge of Photography.
In 1986 he founded the photo-agency VU and in 1998 the connected gallery, VU.
In 1997 he was the art director of the Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie in Arles and has then been invited as curator to several photo-exhitions (Foto Biennale in Rotterdam in 2000, PhotoEspana in Madrid in 2001, South Eastern Asia and Corea Section at Biennale “PhotoQuai” at Musée du Quai Branly, Paris in 2007) and was the art director of the first photo festival Photo Phnom Penh in Cambodia in 2008-2009.
He collaborates with various magazines and newspapers, such as Internazionale (Italy), El Pais Semanal and La Vanguardia (Spain) and Clarin (Argentina) as well as with the website artnet.fr.
Among his publications are works about Sebastiao Salgado, Paolo Pellegrin, Jacques Henri Lartigue.

Workshop brief

Water: The Challenge

Meditations upon a Fabrica assignment
By John L. Walters, editor of Eye Magazine
London, November 2009

The big issue.
What a big subject! Water is everywhere, molecules of H2O in our bodies, clothes, food, drink and nearly every aspect of our environment. Lack or excess of water can be an extreme source of interest and anxiety, depending on your geographical location. On a trivial, daily level, there are decisions about whether to wear a raincoat or take an umbrella; whether one needs to water an absent neighbour’s plants or let nature deal with them. The difficulty of requesting tap water in a snooty restaurant.

My friend in Colorado has a cabin in the Rockies, and her biggest worry is that a neighbour might be stealing her water: the levels in her tank have been falling dramatically. She quoted an American magazine article speculating that future wars would be fought over water rather than oil. Our wasteful, unthinking attitude towards this most basic and vital component of life was one of the big issues at the heart of one of Fabrica’s recent student assignments.

There have been some provocative design initiatives linked to water in recent months. The AIGA Aspen Design Challenge (aspendesignchallenge.org), judged earlier this year, was an admirable attempt to bring together thinking about the subject in the form of an international competition.

‘One of the challenges in the water area,’ says juror Peter Gleick, of the Pacific Institute, ‘is the failure to understand the problem, and the forms of the problem and the forms of solutions.’

This put me in mind of Angela Morelli’s MA project ‘The Global Water Footprint of Humanity’, carried out in collaboration with the Water Footprint Network (waterfootprint.org) whose mission is to promote a ‘transition towards sustainable, fair and efficient use of fresh water resources worldwide.’ Morelli’s design project, incorporating a book, Flash animation, maps and models, is a visualisation of the impact of human consumption on the natural water environment. Morelli’s little blue bookmark reproaches me with the information that the cup of tea I am about to drink required the consumption of 30 litres of water. A cup of coffee uses up 140 litres; a T-shirt 2700.

Any design project that deals with a big issue such as ‘water’, or, say, ‘windpower’, or ‘urban rage’ will have to deal with large amounts of information, hard statistical facts and figures, the outcome of patient research. The designers will also have to tackle the thinking, the theories and ideas that lie behind the research. Graphic designers are often keen to involve themselves in ‘personal research’, and carry out independent projects, yet we know that the best work usually comes from collaborations with specialists. For an ambitious social or ecological project, designers can play a significant part within a team if they and their colleagues are prepared to engage with design as a verb rather than a noun.

Isotype founders Marie and Otto Neurath used the concept of the ‘transformer’ for the process involved in shaping and communicating specialist information for a non-specialist audience. As Erik Spiekermann writes in his Eye 73 review of The transformer (Hyphen Press) by Robin Kinross and Marie Neurath: ‘Like journalists who take facts and prepare them for their readerships, designers have always been transformers. Whatever we do to the information we shape, we influence its reception by transforming it.’ This is not a trivial matter: the visual presentation of facts about big issues such as global warming, violence or the economy can play a big part in changing public perceptions and attitudes – and, ultimately, policy and behaviour.

Transformation
We associate Isotype with pictorial diagrams (and The transformer contains many fine examples of graphic clarity) but one could argue that the concept and role of ‘the transformer’ can be applied to every aspect of visual communication, from framing the initial brief to the final execution – whatever the medium, and whatever the techniques employed.

Designers have ever more tools and channels at their fingertips – interaction, animation, typography, illustration, art direction / photography – so the opportunities are greater than ever.

On the one hand, these can be opportunities to miss the point – and to waste the client’s time and money. But on the other, there’s chance to explore inspiring and poetic forms of expression and communication. To make things better. The choices facing young designers can be bewildering: contemporary design practice can seem like a monstrous mixing desk with so multiple inputs and outputs, bristling with knobs, faders and meters. When you edit a magazine, you see the results of this confusion, with many unfocused personal projects that fetishise the processes and raw materials of design. This problem isn’t confined to any particular area – you see one can see purposeless ‘design fodder’ in every area of endeavour, from letterpress to Flash websites, from posters through character design to perfect-bound booklets.

If we agree that design is not art, then it follows that a each graphic design project must have some purpose, a brief, a clear goal at its heart. If Erik Spiekermann is correct in saying that designers are like journalists, then their designs must tell a story.

At the Aspen Design Challenge, designer and juror Brian Collins articulated the challenge well: ‘We’ve got to find ways to reframe what we see … we need new stories, new narratives, new myths.’ He was talking about water, but he could be talking about any number of present-day problems that demand the attention of graphic designers.

Innocence and experience
And this is where I reveal my own prejudices, because I believe that making a magazine is all about narrative, about telling stories. Despite the fact that most writing requires a degree of creativity, journalism is not ‘creative writing’. And, despite the personal involvement (and sacrifices) demanded by editing a publication like Eye, making a magazine is not self-expression.

Some editors may view their magazines as a vehicle for their obsessions, but that’s not my idea of fun – or profit. When a writer friend once observed that it must be nice to have a title that you could fill with whatever took your fancy, I responded by saying that I didn’t regard a magazine as a personal outlet. Magazines, journals, newspapers, fanzines … are for their readers. Editors constantly learn from everyone: their contributors, their collaborators, their detractors and fans. A magazine can be a kind of university, a coming together of knowledge and scepticism; of innocence and experience. And a circus, where the editor is a ringmaster, dealing with clowns as well as high-flyers.

Journalists who work on newspapers and magazines tend to talk about ‘stories’ as a matter of course. Individual pieces might be caption reviews, opinion pieces, critiques, long essays, short picture essays, and so on, but each of them is a story, and each must have something to say. And though Eye is in some respects closer to a journal, or a book (and often has more content that comparable books), the magazine format and ethos is one that we take seriously.

All editors are bombarded with ideas for their titles: from public relations professionals, writers, photographer, friends, and colleagues. Everywhere you go there are helpful suggestions along the lines of: ‘You should put this (or that) in your magazine.’ In the case of Eye, we are often approached by designers who say something on the lines of: ‘What do I have to do to get my work noticed by Eye magazine? To which one answer might be: ‘Tell us a story.’

However that story is best told by a sympathetic, objective writer – a journalist, historian or specialist who is in a position to put the work into context, whether social, political, commercial or aesthetic. Such writers will be partial and opinionated, but they have a role to play in mediating the work and the ideas for a wider audience. The reader can calibrate their response to the critique through their knowledge of what the critic has said before. You can disagree with the critical position while appreciating the ‘grain’ of the critique.

Yet designers who write – if only very occasionally – can also contribute a huge amount. Writing can help you understand the process of transforming the elements of design practice into words, which can be essential when dealing with colleagues, clients and collaborators. In magazine culture, it brings a practitioner’s perspective to design criticism. Speaking personally, I wish that more designers would propose articles for Eye. Interestingly, as Adrian Shaughnessy points out in Design Culture (Unit Editions), writing about others can be an indirect but positive way to promote your practice: ‘I noticed that if you bleated about yourself no one noticed. But if you talked about things other than yourself, people sometimes listened.’

It is seldom enough for a designer to say: ‘Here’s my great work, come and pay tribute.’ This applies whether you are a one-person practice or a huge design agency. At some point the designer, or someone in their team, will need to tell a story. This point was made quite forcefully in a piece for the Eye blog by Mike Radcliffe, who runs the London recruitment agency Represent. His article ‘Trouble getting through the door?’ [http://blog.eyemagazine.com/?p=236] attracted a great deal of attention because he proposed that designers reconsider the way they presented their work in the light of the story it told about them:

‘Many designers fall in to the trap of not understanding how to tell the story of their work. They simply display their work as an archive and try to make it look as pleasing to the eye as possible. They often fail to make three fundamental points. The first is to explain the brief for each project in their folio. The second is to show the design solutions they provide. Third is to illustrate the benefits provided through the design … every piece of design is itching to tell its story!’

A portfolio that merely showed a succession of good work, Mike argued, would never engage the interest of a potential employer or client. It should show the work in a way that demonstrates a narrative shape and direction to the designer’s career.

Nurturing the blog
Having said so much about telling stories, I now have to qualify, and possibly compromise my own position on the subject. In the summer of 2008, shortly after taking Eye magazine into independent ownership, we launched the Eye blog, blog.eyemagazine.com. At present, we aim to publish at least five blogs a week. So in addition to the slow-burning, continuous work required for our carefully prepared, beautifully produced quarterly, we have to keep ‘feeding and watering’ the blog – it’s a very hungry organism.

This means that we have to take a different approach to selecting, accepting and publishing stories – in British journalistic terms, you might say that the Eye blog is more ‘tabloid’ in its approach. Sometimes, the ‘story’ is little more than a picture; at other times it can be a long academic essay (see the articles by David Crowley and Leslie Atzmon). And there are blog posts that return to ideas and subjects already featured in print: for example we are about to publish an interview with Joe Sacco, whose documentary work was featured in Eye 31 and Eye 44. Some of the most popular blog posts are responses to events, such as Sara Martin’s recent piece about Pentagram’s Paula Scher, an edited ‘show and tell’. And the blog can feature embedded videos and links to sounds and animation that we can’t possibly show in the printed magazine. But we’re still making it up as we go along, and there’s plenty more to learn.

Perhaps the most exciting elements of editing the Eye blog are its immediacy and the chance to work with new writers: it has become a great way to discover new writing talent, and even self-described ‘non-writers’ who have something to say. It’s fun, too. And though most design publications need their share of ‘eye-candy’ and arresting visual images, we still need to tell those stories. Thanks for listening to mine.

Fabrica invited John L. Walters, Editor of Eye Magazine – The International Review of Graphic Design (www.eyemagazine.com) as guest commenter for the final presentation of Christian Caujolle’s workshop on October 9th 2009. The presentation inspired this essay.

For further information:
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Christian Caujolle

John L. Walters, editor Eye Magazine