Hurt
When I thought about the word “Hurt”, I immediately thought about the image on the front cover of the book “A little life”, written by Hanya Yanagihara. It is a photography by Peter Hujar.
Task
This project was based only on one word. The word “hurt”. From here on the brief was completely open, other than creating a booklet in the “Identity Design Laboratory” class of the Visual Design Master Course at Scuola Politecnica di Design.
It’s a powerful yet perplexing image. At first glance one wonders, what is happening here? Is this man in pain, or ecstasy? It seems it could be either.
The author Yanagihara fought to use the photo on the cover because of the ambiguity of whether the man is in pleasure or pain. It gives the viewer a sense that they may be seeing someone at their most vulnerable – as readers witness Jude, one of the main characters of the story, throughout the book seeing someone at their most vulnerable applies to both pleasure & pain.
In another interview, she again referred to the uncertainty of the image as being what makes it so alluring, the pendulum swinging between ‘ecstasy or agony’ with viewers unclear as to whether they are ‘witnessing or trespassing’. This bears striking similarities to the novel itself, where, as a reader, you feel uncertain as to whether you should have the ability to read and experience so much of the protagonist Jude St. Francis’s suffering, and the many difficult things which happened to him, stretching from childhood to adulthood where he attempts to navigate the world after experiencing the depths of emotional and physical suffering and trauma. The tone struck by the book cover’s ambiguity stretches across the novel itself, where occurrences and important details reveal themselves, unfurling slowly but surely across decades.
