Pencil on Paper
24.04.18 | Article by Olu Odukoya | Art, culture, Magazine | MM10 Click to buy
In an age in which everything in existence has a viral quality, it would be naïve not to expect the same from our analogue news.
Marking the death of one of our greatest cultural icons, David Bowie, the next week’s papers — not only in England, but also all
over the world — were monopolised. Proving that the internet may be a better, more capable fit for our new ways of thinking than newsprint, the universal outpouring of grief on our social media found its mirror in — well, The Mirror; as well as The Sun, The Guardian, The New York Times, Le Monde, and even Die Zeit.
Pencil on Paper is a photographic series examining this phenomenon
of a totally synchronised media, where virality touches print, and pencils and paper and zeroes and ones are conflated. In the aftermath of his death, on January 12th, all the news fit to print was of Bowie — the event,
according to Cathal Milmo in The Independent, was “no different from his life: a work of art.”