LIFO — Hunger Games
A cover about Africa that refuses to be a photograph: faces collaged, painted over in earth, then roughened until the surface itself is carrying the argument.
LIFO — Hunger GamesThe brief
A self-set brief — an artistic cover for the Athens newspaper LIFO on the single theme of Africa. The trap with that theme is a photograph of one face with a headline dropped over it, which turns a continent into a stock image.
The move
So I built the image instead of shooting it. Photographs of people in Africa are collaged into each other, painted over in earth colours, and then roughened with real materials until the surface has a grain of its own. Nobody in it stays identifiable as one person, because the cover is not about one person. The title is mine: Hunger Games.
The detail
The masthead had to survive all that noise. LIFO sits bottom-left in flat white — the only clean shape on the page — and the title is set small and widely letterspaced in the upper right. Two quiet anchors, which is exactly what lets the rest of the surface stay as rough as it wants to be.
- Photo collage built up rather than photographed
- Painted in earth colours, then textured with real materials
- Edited in Photoshop, laid out in InDesign
- Masthead and title left as the only flat shapes on the page