The light dark contrast is such in this photograph that, except for a speck of rust on the grill, this might be easily mistaken for a monochromatic image. Apart from the firm grasp of the obvious — “Ack! Truck!” — I also enjoy the dynamic between the larger, dark square of grill with its advancing bright letters and, grounded at the bottom edge as well, the nearly squared off section of headlamp. The rectangles within the grill and the lines pressed into the lamp’s glass add extra geometric dimension.
John Cage’s aphorism about the musicality of trucks was the most apt addition of text I could find. I used a simple font and applied a minor transformation for perspective. It might be worth experimenting with some other colors for the font, even though I expect white is probably the best choice against the black grill.
The Ack truck image is entirely self-revelatory. The text is a humorous aside, but is not necessary. For this snapshot, which was taken completely unpremeditated and unstaged, the text is context.
Although the design bifurcates itself quite naturally in a rhythm of light and darkness, maybe not so differently from life, it is not abstract enough to be mostly about contrast and not sufficiently representational to show the object as it is. So what is it? A shopping bag of a bag in which my keys and phone and wallet are perpetually going missing. A bag that has to be called onto the carpet regularly, by which I mean its contents have to be messily upended so that whatever necessity I seek may be found. A bag with a mean zipper that is always nipping away at cloth or paper. A bag that defies Freud to tell it what a woman’s bag represents.
The font, especially masked and warped to approximate the bag’s curve, evokes the Sixties, the era in which we first talked about what is and what is not one’s “bag”: “That’s not my bag, man.”
But this is explicitly my bag, tough and aging fast. It has something in common with me.
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