PRA(V)DA

©2016 16-page, tabloid size newspaper (Edition of 20)

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The title is a play on words – Prada the Italian fashion brand and Pravda (‘Truth’)
the newspaper of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union.

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Most of the British press use Getty Images for photographs. A search for news photographs of the then Prime Minister Theresa May, came up with hundreds of photographs of her shoes.

The supplied caption might be about important news events such as the government’s response to a terrorist incident, but seemingly every Getty photographer would include a picture of what she was wearing on her feet at the time.  I collected these and included them in this mock tabloid newspaper, as a critique of the press’s role as “The Fourth Estate”.

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The British media's seeming obsession with Prime Minister Theresa May’s footwear had two, not mutually exclusive explanations. Mrs May lacked any interesting character traits. Like John Major she was essentially another dull ‘grey’ Tory leader. Newspaper captions suggested her taste in shoes revealed a ‘playful’ even ‘saucy’ side. The other explanation was they could not take a female politician seriously, and could not help themselves from making sexist and misogynist comments. Either way, rather than critical reporting of politics, the public got irrelevant distractions, which may have been the point.