While studying Alfred Stieglitz's Dada magazine and Guillaume Apollinaire's Il Pleut (It's Raining), it was interesting to compare the use of images in these two pieces to each other and to the vorticist images in BLAST. The images in BLAST were angular and acute, black and white. They used stark contrast of colors and severe angles to create powerful abstract images. 

Stieglitz's work in Dada utilizes depictions of machine-like objects that seems as if they might be found in a manual or a blueprint. While one of the objects looks like a lamp of sorts, I was unable to identify what the other machines might do. I know very little French, so I thought the text that accompanied these images might be about the way in which these images are utlized or what they represent as products of the war. However, after using a translator to help me with the French, I learned that the phrases are humanized, making the machienes seem alive (which I suppose is the purpose of a manual in the first place). For example, one image looks like a tool of some sort that might have a screwing device at one end (page 4). The text above it reads, "PORTRAIT D'UNE JEUNE FILLE AMERICAINE DANS L'ETAT DE NUDITÉ," which translates to "PORTRAIT OF AN AMERICAN GIRL IN THE STATE OF NUDITY." I'm not sure how to interpret this image when it is accompanied by this text, but I recognized that this sentiment is somewhat backward from what we encountered in Brittain's Testament of Youth, as she said that she was becoming an automoton - a machine. This image in Dada might suggest that the inverse is occuring and that machines are becoming more human throughout the war.

Guillaume Apollinaire's It's Raining also employs illustration to emphasize its message. Rather than seperating text and image, Apollinaire turns text into an image by typing his poem in such a way that it looks like streams of rain coming from the sky. Readers are meant to read from top to bottom rather than left to right. I read this poem aloud the first time I read it, and, for some reason, I actually found myself reading in a lower voice as I got closer to the bottom of the page. I think I was prompted by the way the poem was written to do this, and I was most intruiged by this use of image when comparing the three works.

BLAST, Dada, and It's Raining each find a way to diverge from artistic norms while effectively making simple images more complex. In BLAST, there is no color, no shading, and very few curved lines, yet the way in which the shapes and figures in the pieces are composed come together in an intruiging way. Wyndham Lewis is able to evoke emotion with mere shapes. Alfred Stieglitz draws a fascinating parallel between man and machine with his work in Dada by juxtoposing simple diagrams and thought-provoking French phrases. Guillaume Apollinaire manages to use literal imagery in his text with formatting, eliminating the need for a drawing.