Front Pages with Pictures of Women
Front Pages with Pictures of Women and Flowers
The front covers of Laura Fields’ artist books are literally above-the-fold front pages of The New York Times with a white mailing sticker printed with the artist’s address. Fields does not maintain her privacy, but scans the front pages of her papers as they are.
Fields has a forensic eye for detail. Since 2014, she has created diptychs for her artist books by pairing front pages with edited images transformed into paintings, drawings or digital renderings. The viewer is compelled to examine details closely, and like in a puzzle, the edges are crucial. Fields’ work pits the ubiquitous subject of “women and flowers” from the history of art against the visual reportage of the daily news.
Front Pages with Pictures of Women Fighting COVID
Image spreads from the book Front Pages with Pictures of Women and Flowers, feature scanned front pages of The New York Times and digitally cut out portions of women’s clothing or flowers from press photographs. In her most recent series, “Front Pages Covid,” which has yet to be made into a book, Fields creates a diptych by pairing an extracted photograph from a front page with its re-presentation: cropped, enlarged or reduced with its Ben-day dots visible. These doubled images linger in the mind as do their headlines. Each pairing comprises a Chapter that is numbered and date. As of this writing, COVID-19 and its implications on global health and movement remain a stark reality. Fields continues to chronicle our encounters with images and texts in newsprint, creating an atlas in real time and of our time.
-LB
