2018 - 2019 While living in London during the years surrounding the Brexit referendum and its aftermath, Norman Behrendt developed a fascination with the Evening Standard, a free tabloid newspaper distributed daily throughout the city's public transport network.
During a period marked by political uncertainty and intense public debate, the newspaper presented an often bewildering mixture of stories: dramatic Brexit headlines appeared alongside celebrity gossip, lifestyle features, and popular culture. Behrendt became interested in the peculiar visual logic of these front pages, where political crises and entertainment were woven into a single visual narrative. Complex political developments were condensed into catchy headlines and paired with seemingly unrelated imagery, producing combinations that were at once familiar, absurd, and strangely revealing.
After returning to Berlin, Behrendt continued the project with the help of Ambrogio, an Evening Standard distributor at Finchley Road Station, who carefully collected and saved copies of the newspaper over nearly two years before sending them to Germany. The resulting archive became both a record of a historical moment and a reflection on the mechanisms through which that moment was mediated and consumed.
Using the cyanotype process, Behrendt reworked selected covers from the archive. Large parts of each page disappear into a monochrome field of Prussian blue, leaving only fragments of text and image visible.
Through this act of reduction, Brexit-related headlines and their seemingly unrelated accompanying imagery come sharply into focus. The series reveals how one of the most consequential political transformations in recent British history was framed through the visual language of tabloid journalism. By isolating and amplifying these unlikely juxtapositions, the works expose a media landscape in which politics, entertainment, and consumer culture became increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another, ultimately collapsing into a single spectacle.
Developed alongside the project Blueprint (2017–2020), which examines Brexit through online video material and digital media archives, the series extends Behrendt's broader investigation into the role of media in shaping political perception and collective experience.