For my Bridge 4: Connections public service advertising campaign, I focused again on the location of 14th St. Park and a target audience of young women and designed a poster campaign in collaboration with the 501(c) nonprofit Stop Street Harassment to discourage gender based street harassment in public spaces in New York City this summer. The benefit of a campaign in collaboration with an organization dedicated to documenting and ending street harassment is the creation of a safe, respectful, and pleasant public environment in the city. This campaign is necessary because street harassment, though trivialized, is a common violation of the right to use a public space without being intimidated. It is not just for men – it raises general awareness about the seriousness of catcalling and public harassment. This campaign promises to discourage and raise awareness about the prevalent and unacceptable nature of street harassment and reduce instances of its occurrence to create a safer, and more respectful and pleasant outdoor public space in New York City this summer.
My public service advertising campaign consists of a series of three posters that feature black and white film photographs of women’s bodies overlaid with stitched-on statements. These statements, all beginning with the word “not”, retain a similar syntax and defiant tone and focus on what the nature of street harassment and female existence in a public space isn’t, in order to call attention to street harassment for what it is: a violation. Each poster addresses a different issue relating to gendered street harassment; the first, which features a woman’s face, the statement “not your dog”, and the tagline “not here for your whistles” addresses the common occurrence of men whistling at women. The second poster, which features a nude woman, the statement “not for you”, and the tagline “not up for grabs” focuses on unsolicited and unwanted attention, particularly of the physical nature. The third poster, with another woman’s face and the statement “not a compliment”, preceded by the tagline “an exercise in male power is”, addresses and dismantles the root cause of street harassment as compared to its social interpretation.
The general slogan for this campaign, printed onto each poster, is “not part of the petting zoo.” In line with the defiant tone of the statements and taglines, this slogan is also linked to the multimedia visual and tactile design of the posters. While the black and white photographs present the bodies of women to the viewer, the bold statement text refutes any idea that these bodies exist for consumption. This text is individually lettered out of fabric and textured paper, and attached to the background image with minimal hand-stitching. All of the paper and fabric used follows a skin-tone based color palette, in varying shades of tan, pink, and red. The text represents the tones of the bodies of the women photographed in black and white: it is their skin; their sexual attractiveness. Purposely tactile, the viewer wants to touch the type, but the words are textual reminders that they are not entitled to the female bodies the type represents.
