Modern Myths (2011), one of the recent works of the English photographer Veronica Bailey, is closely related to this Barthes’s theory about mythology. Bailey translates ancient Greek gods as the very genesis of existent human beings into modern myths—the various kinds of the mass media, and especially the newspaper, which is one of the most traditional media. The subjects are the different sections of rolled newspapers, and the resulting images are decided by the colors and number of the pages of newspaper and the intensity of the grasp and the resulting shape. As a result, the images produced by photographing twelve different newspapers are personified as twelve Greek Olympian deities who have their own symbolisms. Although the photographs of the newspapers located in the middle of the dark background are in themselves still lifes, consequently, they are seen as some kinds of ‘portraits’ together with the titles referring to different Greek mythological figures.

 Bailey’s attempt for the demythification of the newspaper by employing the subject matters of ancient myths occurs in two different horizons. One is to debilitate the power of the newspaper by presenting it as ‘unreadable text’. The artist censures the universal belief that the media delivers reality as it is by re-present text, which can be characterized as the mediatic core of the newspaper, through unreadable new images. Today, one hesitates to doubt that he or she can be informed of all the incidents occurring throughout the world through various channels of the mass media, but in reality the development of the media is accompanied by all the more distortion and manipulation of facts due to its collusion with capital and power. In this respect, the artist argues for the existence of truths totally detached from one’s belief behind the countless phenomena distributed through the media. The other horizon of her Modern Myths is to diminish the absolute power of the media by forcing one to ‘be confronted with the materialistic nature’ of the newspaper. The artist’s use of the technique of high definition close-up for the delicate depiction of the texture of paper and the unique edge peculiar to the newspaper reveals the undeniable fact that the newspaper is nothing but cheap paper that is destined to be disposed upon the completion of its service to deliver the news stories for the day (or for the week), and this allows the artist to impair the status of the myths of the media. 

by Hyeyoung Shin | Art Critic