The Hallmark Holiday
'Tis the season... for the greeting card narrative. Â Greeting card companies, such as Hallmark, have had the grand tradition of selling narratives to the general public especially during the holiday festivities this time of year. Â These carbon-copied, cookie-cutter narratives are usually meant to be a stand in for our very own life events. Â However, we instead get on the faces of these greeting cards images that have no meaning, no connection, no direct impact on our lives. Â The narratives are pure commercial in an attempt to sell us a greeting card and the end results are images that are banal, random, exaggerated, and too perfect, at best.
For the project, I took the greeting card images and appropriated them in my own way by cropping them from their original context (i.e. the greeting card text). Â After doing so, the narrative then became more open to our own interpretations. Â By editing the images even further (i.e. by cropping even more, color manipulating, etc.), the narrative of the image changed drastically. Â The narratives of the image can be changed so drastically that the images can be made more random and confusing, sometimes not having the appearance of once belonging on the face of a greeting card. Â You finally realize that by taking away the greeting card message and focusing solely on the image that the image only contained its commercial narrative when it was seen in conjunction with its entire original context.
The project allowed me to detail the extensive range of commercial narratives available for purchase to the consumer by focusing on the very images that are meant to represent these narratives.  As time progressed, I realized that these images are nothing but stock images and stand ins for our own life events and do nothing for us.  They have no true emotions in them.  Through editing, I attempted to somehow change the original narrative and try my best to finally insert some type of emotion or feeling into them.
At the end of the project, I only had three questions that still begged to be answered: Â Why are these images/narrative used to sell memories if they have absolutely no real impact on us? Â Why do we keep buying these images/narratives? Â How is this a multi-million dollar industry?
Perhaps we should all get into this business.












