Chinese tea · halftone, one red band
Photocopied until only the contrast is left
Thirty-four Chinese teas run through a copier: blown-out halftone, dust in the blacks, one flat red band across the image and the name set sideways in condensed caps.
Chinese tea · halftone, one red band
Thirty-four Chinese teas run through a copier: blown-out halftone, dust in the blacks, one flat red band across the image and the name set sideways in condensed caps.
7 teas · 5 categories
Pushing a photograph through high-contrast halftone destroys the colour and keeps the structure, which for tea means the twist, the curl and the broken edge survive while the pretty brown does not. That is a fair trade: leaf shape is the part you can actually judge from an image. The red band is the only saturated element and it is used as a bar rather than a background, so it cuts the picture instead of framing it. Type is condensed, boxed and often rotated, because a zine page is assembled from strips rather than laid out on a grid. Archive numbering in the corner keeps each sheet part of a series, which matters when the same shop is printing thirty-four of them. Nothing is cleaned up: the dust and the copier noise are the record of how the sheet was made.