"Unobvious": Catalog of contemporary tastes of Americans

EVERY DAY PHOTOGRAPHERS AROUND THE WORLD looking for new ways to tell stories or to capture what we previously did not notice. We choose interesting photo projects and ask their authors what they wanted to say. This week is the "Not In Your Face" series by New York photographer Susan Barnett. She analyzed the prints and slogans on the clothes and backs of Americans and made a card file of attitudes, preferences and problems that concern society.

My project "Not In Your Face" is warmly received around the world. I think this is all because each of us has that favorite T-shirt, bought at a concert of the classroom, or with the symbol of the city in which you had a great vacation. T-shirts have long become real trophies, they remind us of events, people, places and problems that mean a lot to us or mean once. With this project, I wanted to draw the attention of people to the fact that on the backs of people around you can find messages every day, and they themselves in the morning put on things with meaning. Sometimes they wake up serious and choose T-shirts with political slogans, and on another day with silly jokes. In general, everyone has such a T-shirt, and - most importantly - everyone wants to know what is written on other people's expensive T-shirts.

At the same time, my project is not about T-shirts at all, as it may seem at first glance. "Not In Your Face" - these are stories about people who tell their stories. I was looking for heroes in the crowd, choosing those on whose backs it was easy to count the messages that they wanted to convey to others. These messages are a mixture of images and phrases from modern culture that uniquely give rise to additional meanings. Street iconography is made up of people in such T-shirts, and by exploring it, one can understand what cultural, political and social problems worry contemporaries.

I also chose to shoot people in talking T-shirts because such things are time capsules in the sense that they talk about a specific period and stage. When I started to shoot this project, Obama was just elected president and, wherever you looked, everywhere you could see people wearing Yes We Can T-shirts. Today these T-shirts look like things from the past. I photographed the heroes from the back intentionally, but I still consider these pictures as portraits. Is there any urgent need to show the facial expression of a person in order to understand who he is and what he feels? Thus, I also tested the rules of portraiture and tried to show the individuality of a person from an unexpected angle. The experiment was obviously successful, so this fall “Not In Your Face” comes out in the form of a book, which will be called “T: A Typology of T-Shirts”.