youseeing
in his own words…
In 1983, my second year at the Kunstgewerbeschule Basel, I began a project in Wolfgang Weingart’s typography class experimenting with different ways of combining type and image. He is a master and pioneer in this field, so it seemed like a good idea, and I chose a small poster series as my testing ground—another WW inspiration. For typographic elements I used my address in Basel, Haltingerstrasse 14. For imagery I worked with anything in or occurring in my apartment, but that soon grew to include travel experiences and whatever I wanted, really. It was very exciting working in this collage-like way, drawing and cutting out letters and pictorial elements and moving them around under glass. This was before the days of Illustrator and Photoshop, but Weingart’s working method was very much a precursor to the layering capabilities those software programs would eventually offer. Layers of film (positive and negative) would be taped together, back lit, photographed in a copy camera and “merged” into one layer of film. Then the combining and manipulating with other pieces of film would start all over again. The possibilities were limitless. Of course, my project was limited to six “posters” produced over the course of a year. Shown here are the results as they appeared in Typographishe Monatsblätter at the end of that wonderful year. Thank you, Weingart.