Summer Brief - Primary Stages

Summer Brief

'A-Z' Type in Context

The brief asked for us to photograph and document a collection of type in a chosen location.

At the beginning of Summer I went on a trip of a life time to Japan. I spent 2 weeks travelling through the country from Tokyo, to Hiroshima and down to Kyoto.  After giving it some thought I came up with a way to combined this opportunity with the summer brief.

Being in a country that is so culturally different and alien to me, I struggled at first to come up with a way I could explore the brief.

As the brief consists of the study of alphabet and type, I quickly realised that I had a huge task on my hands given the thousands of characters that make up the Japanese alphabet.

To overcome this daunting exercise, I started to research ways in which I could either simplify or break down their alphabet in a way that would be easier for me to document and understand.

I came across a subcategory called 'Katakana'. This particular subcategory is used to translate foreign words into their own. This allows for them to pronounce words in a way that is more natural and better understood by the population. The alphabet is explained below...

 

It is made up of 5 letters a long with a large number of different sounds that combine to form translations of foreign languages.

The reason I chose this subcategory is because the characters are generally a lot more simple in appearance and more similar to our own alphabet which would make it easier for me to spot individual characters within a language I can't read.

This reason develops into the purpose of my project.

My aim with this project is to build some sort of bridge between two extremely opposing cultures. I will be translating the characters of the Katakana alphabet into sounds and letters that we can relate to and translate. This will then result in a way to compare and find a similarity between our language and there's, making it less alien and confusing.

My photographs and documentation are below...

Road Markings

Signage

Wayfinding

As I was constantly trying to find my way around Japan, I often found myself trying to understand and recognise signage and way finding as there would often not be an english translation, In turn a large number of my images include these.

The next stage is to find each character within the photos I've taken in order to translate and digest the material I have so that it is legible for an english speaking person to understand.