Reading Revolutionaries

Reading Revolutionaries proposes an alternative reading of John Sparagana's work in the form of a literal understanding of visual information as text. Crowds & Powder: The Revolutionaries, a large-scale work of art, is translated into the format of a mass-market paperback book. Arranged over eighty double-page spreads, each individual page frames a full-scale fragment of this work. This small volume perpetuates Sparagana s manipulation of printed media and contributes to the ongoing study of the relationship between media and the arts. Not only does it allude to a growing discourse on the control and manipulation of visual narrative, as increasingly witnessed from political imagery to popular culture, but it also investigates the way we read and process (visual) language