Frozen Chicken Train Wreck. Laurence Hamburger. Chopped Liver Press / Ditto Press.
Posted in Uncategorized on January 18th, 2014Tags: Chopped Liver Press, Ditto Press, Laurence Hamburger
These posters exist for a day. They are conceived in the newsrooms of our tabloid dailies – The Star, The Sun, The Times and others – in the late afternoon, as the paper is being put to bed. Just hours later they are visible along the roadside of every major arterial road in the city.
These tabloid posters – candid and often outrageous epigrams of news – have been displayed along this road since the First Anglo-Boer War. They live momentarily in the minds of passing drivers and pedestrians, and by midnight they are already defunct.
I began collecting South African tabloid posters in 2008 with no other purpose than to preserve them. I thought they were funny, clever and true. Composed in a local vernacular of shebeen English, these statements are part of the texture of our urban fabric; so familiar as to almost disappear. Loud and colourful, tough and sharp, replete with a droll wit and blunt gallows humour, their blatant iconoclasm and muscular use of language is invigorating and oddly reassuring. The newspapers themselves were not keeping an archive, and however ephemeral they might seem I thought there was a relevance in them that was not being recognised; something uniquely South African.
Driving down Louis Botha Avenue, the rhythmic flash of passing headlines reads like a journalistic version of the surrealist game Exquisite Corpse. It’s an alternative history of the city, a tabloid summary of our age. Constructed from political sound-bites, public innuendos, colloquial bon-mots and hard, bitter truths, they read like an everyman’s state of the nation address, full of comedy and antagonism.
“They are,” as one of the copy editors remarked, “the perfect marriage of a corrupt society and a progressive constitution.”
– Laurence Hamburger
Language: English
Pages: 208
Size: 19 x 27 cm
Binding: Hardcover
ISBN: 9780957161221
49€
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