Stories About People: G3 Cover

tories bout eople

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Manuela Cortés

By Kathryn Boyd-Batstone

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anuela Cortés and 35 other families who lost their jobs and their apartments found a solution: occupying a block the crisis left empty and unsold. Again, they wait for eviction. Manuela Cortés, who has been worn and weathered by the hardships of life, spent many days depressed searching for a solution. Social Services repeatedly denied her welfare or a new place to live. The scars of that sadness and struggle are evident in her deep charcoal eyes. The day she joined the civic movement 15M at the Corrala Utopía something changed. The Corrala Utopía is a group of 36 families composed of 118 people, 34 of which are minors, who occupy four blocks of empty apartment buildings, which the crisis left unsold. After the bankruptcy of the real state company that promoted the complexes, its creditor, Ibercaja bank, is now the owner. They are living there with no running water or electricity. Manuela Cortés asked the organizers of the occupation for a room and was accepted.

The light at the end of the tunnel started to grow. Suddenly, she was part of a community of people struggling like her, but struggling together. In the coming weeks, the judge who is dealing with the case after the bank denounced the occupation may choose to evict all of the families living in Corrala Utopia. For Manuela though, living in the streets is not an option. “I am persistent. If they evict me from here, I am going to find another apartment someplace else because I will not live on the streets,” she says. She owns few clothes so to easily wash them in the sink instead of having to go to a laundry, and owns few possessions.

Gateway Three Magazine

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“...Dónde está el trabajo?...”

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er charcoal-colored eyes, like the inside of a cave, reflect a soul hardened by life.

The lines in her face are like the cave’s crevices, each one formed by her environment, shaping her identity. The lines narrow around her eyes and widen around her tight mouth. She sits in a dark room and brings a cigarette up to her lips. She inhales slowly, calming her nerves, her thoughts, her worries. Exhale. In a cloud of smoke, she releases them into the world. It is 6 p.m. and the sun is setting. The room grows darker and darker, but still she does not turn on a light. She sits at wooden table with her eyes fixed on her son. He stands on the other side of the glass window on the balcony of the apartment. His eyes are fixed on the road, looking off into the distance, watching. This house is not theirs. There is no running water or electricity. A small generator provides energy to charge their cell phones. She, along with 35 other families, have been squatting since May 2012 in an apartment complex now know as “Corrala Utopía” (in memory of the Corralas de vecinos, old Sevillian buildings, many of them now gone, which used to reunite families). Manuela claims she is unhappy here.

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Cover Rationale My cover was inspired by a simple, LIFE Magazine design. On the front it had a picture of Marilyn Monroe posing, with a simple heading along the bottom. The thing I noticed most about this design was that it used colors that popped, without the audience knowing. For the G3 cover, I chose the image of Manuela Cortés contrasted by the graffiti because it gave me this same sensation when I looked at it. For the title I chose to position the letters in a superscript serif font because further mirrored the method in which LIFE had chosen to display their text.

Unlike the LIFE magazine, I chose to add extra color around my letters—which is shown by the small dots—to draw the reader’s eyes to the text. This seemed like an important change for my magazine because the woman on the front is not easily recognizable like Marilyn Monroe. With the added detail of color that both contrasted the graffiti, and highlighted the issue title, I felt that the magazine would be better seen and noticed in stands.

From the first draft to the second draft I listened to your suggestions and thickened the outline around the “G3” logo, and also added to the size of the text next to the letters that are leading the words on the cover to help the reader see more of the words as a whole, and less of “SAP.” I, however, still kept these letters larger and out of line with the text, because it added to the structure and visual appeal of the cover itself.

Finally, like the Marilyn Monroe edition of LIFE, I kept room for a postage stamp, and left out all Ads on the cover.

Page Rationale

In the LIFE magazine, there was an elegant mix of stories that were EXTREMELY visual, crisp and clean. One of my favorite pages was that of a large picture of Marilyn Monroe that took up 2/3 of a spread, and was complimented with white space and text. I used this style to create the first layout page for the article. I carefully selected and cropped the picture of Manuela in front of different tents because it allowed me to have this overlap onto two page spreads without losing important details of the image.

For my second page, and my favorite page from the LIFE layout, I chose to use a collage of different pictures to create a tone and intense visual effect. The story itself talks of Manuela living in a hard time with no work, uneasy living conditions and entrapped in mix of grief; for this reason I tinted with blue to create melancholy and contrasted with yellow to show a hint of light.

In the LIFE spread-out, each photo was surrounded by a black box, marking it as an original print of each picture. I decided to manipulate this idea and contrast the colors with a full black background, to further create a visual contrast. (I understand how this may not be best for printing purposes, but my magazine like LIFE, will best sold at a higher cost to make up for the lack of Ads and cost of printing). I also chose to change the colors with an obvious filter, with a contrast to its original, to keep the photographer happy by making the alterations obvious and comparable to his original work. On this page I used the same design for the text with a large margin of white space in between the title and the beginning paragraph.

A short poem: Bottom line, I love my design.