Michael Salu

Artists are often having very similar conversations across the various disciplines through which they choose to excel, but you rarely see them exist in the same pages or spaces.

discipline space artist

You may change your profile picture to Trayvon Martin or Eric Garner, but you will never actually walk the streets the way they have, or systematically had your vertebrae stunted. So you will not walk that shrouded walk unless you're on the inside and you can occasionally nod at another on the inside and that acknowledgement can carry you for a while as it won't come from the outside.

acknowledgement profile

Through panel moderations and talks around culture, politics and identity I gradually gained opportunities to write in my own voice and not that of the brand. I'm interested in a lot of the languages that drive our culture. I'm interested in user experience as language or how societal malaise takes root. So through essays and short stories I began exploring some of these things.

identity writing opportunity

It's odd. Though I've spent years working with and creating images, I feel most comfortable expressing myself through writing. I'd been in denial about this for many years. At school I was highly lauded as having the potential to write one day, but being a typically rebellious and misguided teenager I opted to study art. Ironically language has pervaded all the work I have done - from my first forays into an art practice many years ago to my work with typography and book design.

teenager book art

I was keen to challenge this vernacular as the role of the photojournalist was changing, and images were becoming urgent and more succinctly linguistic. This is why I moved to publishing artists who were challenging the veracity of both the medium and the profession through their works.

publishing artist challenges

Amazingly, my first project at Granta was the Sex issue. Given my own proclivity for the nuances of hedonistic and sexual exploration, partly through art, it was a perfect way to start. I love to interrogate through image - or pose questions through a subversion of said image - and we came up with a visual that caused quite a stir and went on to pick up a Design and Art Direction award.

design perfect art

Alliances, in the great cocktail party of the white man's world, are formed, almost purely, on this basis, for of both of you can laugh, you have a lot to laugh about. On the other hand, if only one of you can laugh, one of you, inevitably, is laughing at the other.

party laughing world

One Negro meeting another at an all-white cocktail party cannot but wonder how the other got there. The question is: Is he for real? Or is he just kissing ass? Almost all Negroes, are almost always acting, but before a white audience - which is quite incapable of judging their performance.

kissing party real

I realize after spending so long working with images, semiotic deconstruction and redeployment becomes second nature. We all speak with images. I guess I look at everything sideways nowadays.

realizing long looks

I'm interested in a lot of the languages that drive our culture. I'm interested in user experience as language or how societal malaise takes root.

language roots culture

Though I've spent years working with and creating images, I feel most comfortable expressing myself through writing.

creating writing years