Triumph

Stephen Ditko · 1996 · Offset lithograph from an 8x10 Polaroid transfer on Arches paper

Awareness poster for DIFFA/Greater Phoenix, the Arizona chapter of the Design Industries Foundation Fighting AIDS, created for The Art Series One and sold and displayed at chapter events. Photographer Rick Rusing brought Ditko onto the assignment, and rather than invent a subject the two asked furniture maker and wood sculptor Kevin Irvin to let them shoot the pieces he had already built for DIFFA to auction. Irvin's chair sculpture was staged in the cove of Rusing's studio and lit into something closer to a monument than a chair: a tall pale spine, a slatted back tipping into the frame like a wing, a long blade of shadow crossing it. Deliberately pushing against the new all-digital desktop, Rusing shot 8x10 Polaroids instead of film and Ditko hand-pulled Polaroid transfers onto Arches paper, burning through both to get the grain, the bruised oxblood glow, and the ragged deckled edge that frames the image. The type is the restraint: small letterspaced caps set on angles that follow the sculpture's own lines, artist credit and chapter name tucked into the dark. Printing was donated. It picked up show recognition, Graphis among them.

I did the expected, overdesigned so I could have my mark. I came to my senses and ultimately restrained the design to a simple typographic solution that mirrored the sculpture.Stephen Ditko

View this poster in The 29 Collection