Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
The Cover as Façade and Its Signification to the Article as Interior: On the notion of “Inequality” in the latest issue of Foreign Affairs by the case study of François Bourguignon’s article “Inequality and Globalization: How the Rich Get Richer as the Poor Catch Up” and the Photograph “Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Road Demolition)” by Greg Girard applied as its cover image
In the latest issue of Foreign Affairs, an American journal of international relations and U.S. foreign policy, the former Chief Economist (2003–2007) of the World Bank François Bourguignon puts forward that inequality within individual countries has increased, though global inequality has come down.1 He also predicts that the latter downward trend will probably persist thanks to the growing domestic markets in China and India, as well as some smaller economies in Latin America and sub-Saharan Africa, yet the former building situation is being underestimated by economists.2 By such a contrast, the mere purpose of the article “Inequality and Globalization: How the Rich Get Richer as the Poor Catch Up” is to point out the fact that “increased inequality within countries has offset the drop in inequality among countries,” which is largely caused by globalization and economic liberalization.3 In order to emphasize the situation of domestic poverty, the author employs words and phrases like “a disheartening trend”, “leaving many citizens behind”, “the poor poorer”, “unskilled workers”, “disenchanted citizens”, which suggests the appearance of poverty as an urban scene and a serious civic problem.
In this vein, the only photograph selected in company with the article is a press image by Agence France-Presse shooted in December 2012 under the title of “Scavenging in a Garbage dump in Hefei, China” (plate 1), aimed to illustrate the sharp contrast as mentioned above. In the foreground of the dramatic scene, a ragged grey-headed female migrant worker is dragging a wagon of construction trash out of a demolished site or a waste landfill. While in the blurred distant view, there stand a number of high-rises housing under construction. The photograph does not necessarily reveal the domestic poverty in China as a result of the conspicuous contradictions between urban and rural areas by juxtapositioning the different everyday spectacle in the rural or the urban. On the contrary, it rather seems as if the poverty should be attributed to the rapid urbanisation that the country is undergoing and the uneven distribution of migrant 1
François Bourguignon, “Inequality and Globalization,” Foreign Affairs, vol.95, no.1 (January/February, 2016): 11. 2 Ibid, 13–14. 3 Ibid, 14. 1
Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
labour brought about. All the details in this photograph are taken for granted to predigest the actual circuit of the social complications stemmed from the intricate geo-political economies in China but present the poverty itself imagined as a simple livelihood issue as part of a traditional matter of cities in the modern term.
Working in concert with the press photograph in the particular article, the cover image of the latest issue of Foreign Affairs (plate 2) applies a work by the Canadian professional photographer Greg Girard (plate 3) to thoroughly denote the notion of inequality. The original title of the work not mentioned in the journal is “Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Road Demolition)” which belongs to the photographer’s Phantom Shanghai series, a collective portraiture showcasing the unique moment when the city was experiencing a radical transformation in the 1990s after “the market reforms initiated by Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s”4. What he managed to document is the utter truth of the newly built cityscape replacing the old vernacular one to catch up its cosmopolitanism during the colonial age in the wake of massive demolition. The single work cropped to fit the cover is oriented by the linguistic sign of the huge white heading “Inequality”, positioned in the middle between the background scene of luminous skyscrapers including the JW Marriott Hotel Shanghai at Tomorrow Square and the Municipal Mansion at People’s Square, the Lippo Plaza and the Hong Kong New World Tower now hosting the K11 Art Mall on Huaihai Road, etc. and the foreground scene of the former neighborhood being pulled down to make room for the expansion of the gentrification project Xintiandi5.
However, the notion of “inequality” as a signifier extracts a single moment of urban construction and renders itself the general reality of economic inequality among civic individuals in the city of Shanghai, the country of China or any other nations mentioned in Bourguignon’s article as experiencing the domestic inequality. What is being signified in this vein is that the boosting urban growth is generating the scene or at least intensifying the problem. To put simply, it appears to be a critique of modernization as the mere existing approach for a nation’s development and the globalization as the ultimate mainstream trend in the contemporary ages, yet fails to involve the political end of the issue of inequality. The three subheadings beneath 4
Ibid, 14. Xintiandi (literally New World) is a stylish pedestrian zone besides Madang Road composed of the vernacular architecture in Shanghai Shikumen (literally Stone Street) which substitutes its residential space with a modern complex of trendy boutiques, restaurants and bars, while leaving its original architectural skin to make a nostalgic imagination for the old city.
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Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
“Inequality” on the cover page are three questions: “What Causes It”, “Why It Matters” and “What Can Be Done”, functioning as the informative device articulating the detailed content in this issue, while the cropped image of Girard’s work architecturally configured with the larger heading “Inequality” as part of its urban construction is adding descriptive properties to the journal. The signification to its inner articles inevitably dominates the reader’s understanding.
Magazine (more commercial) or journal (more academic) design, whether it is an architectural one or not, is a subject of graphic communication featured with architectural characteristics. With the interior of the magazine or the journal, the cover acts like a façade that plays a pivotal role in signifying the publication’s identity either based on the understanding of its geopolitical standpoint or in terms of the specific subject in one certain issue. The problem is that the photographic image selected as the façade can always be alienated from its reality and appropriated to the signification of the publication’s own narrative and discourse. The classical book-like publications are like the architecture in the pre and early modern architecture that its façade tends to talk too much to be either orientating or disorientating. Despite the development of digital media, a number of readers still rely on paper journals and magazines to have the latest news and different entertainment. It is necessary to reconfigure the relationship between the cover and the content of a publication or even the classical narrative of the tectonic structure that constitutes the publication.
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Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
Plates
Plate 1. The page with a press photograph in François Bourguignon’s article “Inequality and Globalization” in Foreign Affairs, vol.95, no.1 (January/February, 2016).
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Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
Plate 2. The cover page of Foreign Affairs, vol.95, no.1 (January/February, 2016).
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Description I
Evonne Jiawei Yuan
Feb 8th, 2016
Plate 3. Greg Girard, “Shanghai Falling (Fuxing Road Demolition)” in Phantom Shanghai series, 2002.
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