CLIENT – Undershaft & Lazarus

CLIENT – Undershaft & Lazarus (by Jennifer Radford)

The Company: Undershaft & Lazarus was a purpose-built company to bring acclaimed Canadian playwright John Lazarus’s EXPOSURE to the Toronto Fringe Festival

EXPOSURE, by John Lazarus

The genesis of this play was an early photograph by Louis Daguerre., taken in Paris in the spring of 1838. The collision of three lives — inventor Louis Daguerre, his ex-mistress, and a suicidal young man — leads to the birth of photography as we know it in this bright new comedic fantasy from award-winning Canadian playwright John Lazarus.

The original image used for the funding application for the show was a wordmark created by another designer incorporating the Daguerre’s original image in the O of the title EXPOSURE (see below).

For the production iconography, we knew we needed a a set of images that brough forth the story and era in an arresting way.  In order to emphasize the human love story at the heart of EXPOSURE, we photographed the cast in period costume. We had them pose seriously, as if for an 1830’s photograph,  alternating with them posing as if taking modern “selfies” with an iphone.

I converted the images to daguerréotype style. I echoed the font of the original wordmark and chose a vivid pink for the title art.