A couple years ago, I listened to an episode of the Throughline podcast called “Strange Fruit.” The episode was about the FBI’s persecution of Billie Holiday in the 1950s, and it described how she was one of the first victims of America’s war on drugs. It explored how the FBI’s stalking and pursuit of the famous singer was also racially motivated—Billie Holiday refused to stop performing her song “Strange Fruit” about lynching and racial violence in the American South. In the episode, the hosts referenced the book Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs. The events about Billie Holiday’s life chronicled in that book eventually became the inspiration for the 2021 film, The United States vs Billie Holiday.
In a course called StyleCraft from Motion Science in 2021, we were assigned a project based around the design principle of contrast. I had just watched the Billie Holiday movie, so I was moved to create a project about her persecution at the hands of the US government. I decided to use the collage aesthetic to give the piece an analog, historical feel. I used contrast and layout to emphasize the opposition between the government and Billie Holiday. I included snippets of the actual redacted FBI files from the government’s case against the famous singer, as well as fragments of a newspaper article about Billie Holiday.
