Warja Lavater - Image Analysis

Warja Lavater is a Swiss artist and illustrator who creates abstract re-tellings of fairy tales that use symbols instead of words. 

The illustrations within her books are accompanied by a key that helps the reader to understand what is what and consequently 'read' the book. What is great about these books is their ability to be universally understood due to the fact that each page of illustration has been created using simple shapes, of different colours and sizes.

Little Red Riding Hood

Above are some examples from one of her books- Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965). I was surprised by how easy it actually was to see what was happening once you know what each colour dot symbolises.

Image Analysis

 In the image on the left, we see the beginning scene of the fairy tale, where Little Red Riding Hood is leaving her Mother to go into the woods to find Granny's house. In the image on the right we see Little Red's encounter with the wolf. The scale and placement of the dots is really interesting here and massively helps with how the scene is read. The difference in size between the red dot (Little Red) and the black dot (the Wolf) makes you fear for the protagonist. It enables you to perceive Little Red as young, small in size, and somewhat vulnerable, and in contrast the Wolf appears large, frightening and a threat to the young girl. The placement of the dots also creates a further level of emotion. The closeness of the red dot to the black dot in addition to the multitude of green dots (the forest) closely surrounding them represents the fact that the protagonist is trapped in an enclosed space with the villain, making it a very dangerous situation for her and thus causing you to feel a sense of worry. The simplicity and stillness of the illustration also enables you to imagine a pause in time where Little Red feels somewhat helpless adding to the depth of the emotion felt when 'reading' the book.

Snow White

Image Analysis

 I firstly want to pick up on the symbol used to depict the character of Snow White in Lavater's edition of Snow White (1974). Lavater has cleverly picked up on the fact that there are three main colours used to describe the protagonist- these being white, black and red. The placement and ratio of these colours within the circle symbol has been determined by what the colours describe - her skin, her hair and her lips- allowing us to instantly understand that this is Snow White. Coincidentally, this symbol also has similarities to that of a target, which we know is essentially what Snow is in this tale- she is being targeted by the Evil Queen.

 In comparison to the page example provided for Le Petit Chaperon Rouge (1965), the illustration is a little more complex, possibly due to Lavater later experimenting and pushing the boundaries of how simple the illustrations needed to be. Both scenes contain a forest, however in this example, the green dots (trees) are overlapped and extremely close to Snow White, creating the illusion that the forest is closing in on her. Furthermore, the forest is littered with black dots that have a triangle shape cut out. These appear to look like creatures with open mouths, especially because most of them are facing Snow White. Once all of this information is put together in the readers mind and processed as a whole image, it is clear that it represents the commonly-known scene in the story after which Snow White has run into the woods in an attempt to escape the huntsman who was sent to kill her. She is let go and then finds herself within the forest where she is lost and frightened by her surroundings.