Design Literacy

by Steven Heller

  Leslie assumed that a well-informed professional—indeed an enlightened one—would be a more discerning customer and so in a corner of his shop he created a graphic arts salon. Regularly frequented by Ladislav Sutnar, Alvin Lustig, and Herbert Bayer, this salon put his type shop at the center of what would now be called “design discourse,” but then was practical design talk. The Composing Room’s unparalleled efforts to elevate the level of graphic arts and typography may have been driven by commercial priorities but nonetheless formed a solid foundation for the celebration and documentation of graphic design.

  In 1934 Leslie founded PM: An Intimate Journal for Production Managers, Art Directors, and their Associates, initially as a house organ. With its co-editor Percy Seitlin, a former newspaper man, this small-format (six-by-eight-inch) “journal” developed into the leading trade publication and outlet for traditional and progressive work, an American Gebrauchsgrafik or Arts et Métiers Graphiques (the latter published by the Deberny and Peignot Foundry in Paris, which also employed publications and exhibitions to further the French graphic arts). PM explored a variety of print media, covered industry news, and developed a strong slant towards modern typography and design. It was also the first journal to showcase the new European immigrants and included illustrated profiles on Herbert Bayer, Will Burtin, Joseph Binder, M. F. Agha, as well as native-grown moderns Lester Beall, Joseph Sinel, Gustav Jensen, and Paul Rand. In 1939 the name PM was sold to Ralph Ingersol, who started New York’s only ad-less daily newspaper and called it PM, so the magazine changed its name to AD, which coincidentally reflected a creative realignment within the profession from production managers to art directors—marking a gradual shift from craft to art.

  Each AD cover featured an original image and redesigned logo. E. McKnight Kauffer’s was characteristically cubistic; Paul Rand’s was playfully modern; Lucian Bernhard’s was suitably gothic; and Matthew Leibowitz’s prefigured new wave in its dada-inspired juxtaposition of discordant decorative old wood types. Although the articles were not critical analyses, they were nevertheless well-written trade pieces peppered with interesting facts and anecdotes. A news column, titled “Composing Room Notes by R. L. L.” provided an account of commercial arts from a vendor’s perspective. For sixty-six issues PM and AD documented a nascent profession as it grew out of a journeyman’s craft.

  Three years after starting PM, Doc Leslie took over a small room in The Composing Room shop that, with the addition of a display case and bright lights, was transformed into the PM Gallery, the first exhibition space in New York dedicated to graphic design and its affinities. Percy Seitlin described the premiere exhibition: “A young man by the name of Herbert Matter had just arrived in this country from Switzerland with a bagful of ski posters and photographs of snow-covered mountains. Also came camera portraits and varied specimens of his typographic work. We decided to let him hang some of his things on the walls and give him a party… . The result was a crowd of almost bargain-basement dimensions, and thirsty too. Everyone was excited by the audacity and skill of Matter’s work.” The magazine and gallery were symbiotic. Often a feature in one would lead to an exhibition in the other or vice versa. Doc Leslie believed “that there was an enthusiastic audience for a showcase featuring the work of artists-in-industry; and, furthermore, that the audience was larger than we had originally thought it ever could be.”

  In April–May 1942 the editors ran this note: “AD is such a small segment of this wartime world that it is almost with embarrassment, and certainly with humility, that we announce the suspension of its publication … for the duration,” wrote editors Leslie and Seitlin. “The reasons are easy to understand: shortage of men and materials, shrinkage of the advertising business whose professional workers AD has served, and all-out digging in for Victory… .” The magazine did not resume publishing after the war but left a documentary record of an important period when American and European designers began to forge an international design language.

  Picture Magazines of the 1930s

  Photography records the gamut of feelings written on the human face, the beauty of the earth and skies that man has inherited, and the wealth and confusion man has created.

  —Edward Steichen, Time magazine (1961)

  Photography changed how the world was recorded. Likewise the “picture magazine” changed how the world was seen. The photojournalist Edward Steichen referred to this genre as a “major force in explaining man to man.” But just as the invention of the photograph in the early nineteenth century made representational painting obsolete, during the past thirty years the spontaneity and immediacy of that other revolutionary medium, television, has made the picture magazine an anachronism.

  Yet before television, picture magazines with rotogravure pages awash with halftones, printed with luminescent inks on velvety paper, were veritable eyes on the world. Photography may have been static, but, when edited like a motion picture and narratively paced to tell a story, the images of never-before-recorded sights offered audiences the same drama—and more detail—than any newsreel. Innovative editors at the leading magazines advanced revolutionary storytelling ideas that altered the way photography was used and perceived. With the advent of faster films and lightweight cameras, photography was freed from the confines of the studio; photographers were encouraged to capture realities that had been previously hidden in the shadows.

  As photography evolved from single documentary images into visual essays, the forms and formats of presentation changed as well. From the mid-nineteenth to the early twentieth century, the picture magazine evolved from a repository of drawn and engraved facsimiles of daguerreotypes into albums of real photographs. With new technology in place, innovation was inevitable. Soon sequences of integrated texts and images, designed to capture and guide the eye, were common methods of presenting current events of social, cultural, and political import.

  While photojournalism (though not officially referred to as such) had been practiced since 1855, when Roger Fenton made history photographing the Crimean War, the ability to reproduce photographs was really possible only after 1880, when Stephen H. Horgan’s invention of the halftone was tested at the New York Daily Graphic and ultimately improved upon by the New York Times. Moreover, prior to 1880, cameras were so large and heavy that they impeded candid or spot news coverage. That is, until the Eastman Kodak Company reduced the camera to a little box, which launched a huge amateur photography fad in Europe and America (and encouraged publication of amateur photography magazines). These pictures were often informal; they were the turn-of-the-century equivalent of Polaroid’s instant pictures in the 1960s and of digital snaps today—immediate photographic gratification.

  Professionally speaking, the most important technological advance occurred in Germany after World War I. In 1925, two compact cameras, the Ermanox and the Leica, were marketed to professional shooters. These cameras made unobtrusive photography possible while providing an excellent negative for crisp reproduction. The Leica was the first small camera to use a “roll” of film (actually, standard motion-picture film) and was fitted with interchangeable lenses and a range finder. The Ermanox was equally efficient, although it used small glass plates, which were soon superseded by film. The small camera became merely an extra appendage, freeing the shooter to make quick judgments.

  One of the chief beneficiaries of this new technology was the weekly Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, then the most progressive of the early picture magazines, whose photographers elevated candid photography to high art and viable journalism. BIZ captured the artistic tumult and political turmoil of the 1920s and bore witness to extraordinary global events in a way unlike any other picture magazine. Its photographers—precursors of the now-pesky paparazzi—reveled in shooting candid poses of the famous and infamous. And in concert with a new breed of “photo” editor they set standards for the picture magazine built on what photographer Erich Salomon called Bildjournalismus, or photojournalism. In the decades that followed, B
IZ was a model for imitators and a point of departure for innovators.

  Erich Salomon fathered the candid news picture for BIZ and dubbed himself “photojournalist.” Although a lawyer by profession, once he was bitten by the camera bug, he devoted his life to photography. By force of will, tempered by an acute understanding of the social graces, he secured entrance to the halls of government, homes of the powerful, and hideaways of the well-to-do. He devised intricate ways to capture the rich and famous unawares on film, and he published these photographs with impunity. He busted the formal traditions that the high-and-mighty found acceptable and brought mythic figures down to size. Today these images, collected in books, are vivid documents of his times.

  When Salomon began shooting in the late 1920s, Kurt Szafranski was appointed editor-in-chief of BIZ and its sister publication, the monthly Die Dame. Both magazines were part of the House of Ullstein, Germany’s largest periodical publisher. Salomon was already working in Ullstein’s promotion department when photography became his obsession. He showed Szafranski his now-famous candid pictures of exhausted delegates to the League of Nations and was immediately awarded a contract to work for BIZ. Szafranski also employed other pioneers of photojournalism—Martin Munkacsi, the action photographer, and André Kertész, then a travel photographer.

  Szafranski and his colleague, Kurt Korff (both of whom eventually moved to Life magazine in New York), were early experimenters with the essay approach—a form that required a variety of pictures and concise captions linked together to build impact and drama. According to the principle of the “Third Effect,” when two pictures are brought together and positioned side by side, each picture’s individual effect is enhanced by the reader’s interpretative powers. This juxtaposition was sometimes possible with disparate images but usually required thematic pictures reproduced in radically different scales. Sometimes, it would be accomplished with serious conceptual photographs; at other times, novelty pictures—such as a stark close-up of a horse’s head next to, say, a close crop of a similarly featured human’s head—made a comic statement. Yet for all their innovation, BIZ’s photographic essays were usually strained juxtapositions of pictures, not stories in the truest sense. The key to success—the integration of image, idea, and words—was frequently lost amid poor and ineffectual layouts.

  Münchener Illustrierte Presse, a popular Bavarian picture magazine, however, took the photograph and ran with it. Its editor and art director was a young Hungarian émigré named Stefan Lorant, who, before leaving his native Budapest in his early twenties, was already an accomplished photographer and film director. He decided to settle in Munich rather than America or England because he was fluent in German. Fortuitously, he fell into the job as assistant to the editor of MIP and, owing to his remarkable energy and ambition, was very soon afterward named its photo editor. Lorant was inspired by Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, yet he also understood that it had failed to use photographs as effective narrative components.

  Over the course of a few years, he guided MIP into a realm of unique photographic endeavor. Partly through intuition, partly through basic inquisitiveness, he discerned exactly what was wanted of a picture journal and directed photographers to follow his vision. Lorant convinced Erich Salomon to contribute to MIP and also sought out new talents who, as he said, “not only took beautiful pictures but who had similar curiosity and journalistic savvy.” An elite corps was assembled, including Felix H. Man, Georg and Tim Gidal, Umbo, Kurt Hubschmann, and Alfred Eisenstaedt (who was later hired by Henry Luce to shoot for Life magazine).

  Lorant said that he encouraged photographers “to travel and shoot as many pictures as possible” so that he could mold an essay. Editorial space was no object; a good feature story would run for as many pages as warranted. Lorant, who was an admitted autocrat, designed the layouts himself. Although the basic layout conventions already existed, Lorant introduced certain design tropes, including what might be criticized today as excessive use of geometric borders, overlapping photographs, and silhouettes. But despite a tendency to fiddle, he acknowledged that his most successful layouts were those where he left pictures alone. He believed that when astutely edited and dramatically cropped, one striking picture reinforced the next and so furthered the narrative. He was partial to photographs that emphasized pure human expression. And one of his most famous assignments was sending Felix H. Man to spend a day with Mussolini in Rome. The photos—an exclusive—were extraordinary exposés of a day in the life of the duce in the course of his mundane acts of power. Lorant’s layout focused on two key, though contrasting, features: Mussolini’s rarely seen, relaxed body in the context of his charged imperial surroundings.

  Although MIP was not devotedly partisan, total objectivity in a Weimar Germany fraught with dissonant ideologies and political violence was difficult. MIP’s picture exposés often focused on the darker side of Nazi rallies and leaders. It wasn’t surprising, therefore, that Lorant was summarily imprisoned when Adolf Hitler assumed power in 1933. Had it not been for the persistence of his wife, a well-known German actress at the time, in obtaining his release (and the fact that he was still a Hungarian citizen), Lorant’s future would have been bleak. After being released, he emigrated to England, wrote a bestselling book entitled I Was Hitler’s Prisoner, and launched two new picture magazines: the Weekly Illustrated in 1934 and Picture Post in 1938. Between these two publishing milestones, Lorant also founded Lilliput, a humor magazine to rival the venerable Punch. After the war he emigrated to the United States, where he edited documentary picture books.

  During the late 1920s and 1930s, the impact of German Bildjournalismus had spread to many of the world’s capitals, but none more so than Paris. Paris Match was arguably the most popular picture magazine, but the newsweekly VU, founded in 1928 and edited by Lucien Vogel, a photographer and publisher of La Gazette du Bon Ton and Jardin des Modes, was the most innovative in terms of the picture essay. Vogel had always been interested more in politics than in fashion and was fascinated by the power of photography to document (indeed, comment upon) current events. The early issues of the magazine had an erratic mix of politics, sports, culture, and spot news as well as carrying book excerpts about the adventures of Babar the Elephant by Vogel’s brother-in-law, Jean de Brunhoff. But in later years photographers like André Kertész, Robert Capa, and Brassaï provided memorable reportage. Capa’s most famous photograph, which depicted a Spanish loyalist soldier in mid-fall who had been hit by a fascist’s bullet, was originally published in VU.

  Vogel believed that graphic design was critical to the success of his magazine. VU’s logo was designed by French poster artist A. M. Cassandre while Charles Peignot, proprietor of the Deberny and Peignot Foundry, consulted on interior typography. A Russian émigré, Irene Lidova, was the first art director; beginning in 1933, her layout assistant was another Russian, Alexander Liberman. He assumed her position a few years later (and subsequently became the art director of Vogue and the creative director of all Condé Nast publications until his retirement in 1995).

  Vogel knew the trick of how to make pictures tell a story. One of his pioneering efforts was the double-truck spread, for which a strong photograph was greatly enlarged to mammoth proportions. Pacing photos from large to small to huge to small again provided impact and surprise. Vogel had a profound influence on Liberman, who later finely tuned the journalistic photo essays in VU. He ascribed his ability to freely manipulate pictures to the fact that “there was no cult of photography at that time.” He could edit photographs and design layouts without the kind of interference from egotistic photographers that is often tolerated today. He further spent long periods ensconced in the darkroom, projecting photos onto layout sheets, cropping and juxtaposing images. He also played with photomontage. Eventually, he took responsibility for VU’s covers. Vogel would often make rough sketches that Liberman would execute via photomontage (signing them “Alexandre”).

  By 1936, Vogel’s left-wing leanings had a profo
und effect on VU’s overall content (essays excoriating the fascists became more frequent), and the magazine’s bias was alienating advertisers as France was turning more vociferously toward the right. Owing to diminishing capital, Vogel was forced to sell the magazine to a right-wing businessman who kept Liberman on as managing editor for a year. Ultimately Liberman could not tolerate VU’s new political orientation. After his departure, the quality of VU’s photographic essays declined.

  Photography as both information and propaganda medium did not go unnoticed by manipulators of thought and mind. Throughout Europe, and especially in Germany, the picture magazine was used to win the hearts and minds of certain constituencies. Among the most influential of these was the socialist/communist-inspired Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung (Worker’s Illustrated News), which began in 1921 as an offshoot of Sowjet Russland im Bild (Soviet Russia in Pictures), designed to propagate a positive image of the Bolshevik workers’ paradise. AIZ was edited by Willi Münzenberg, who was a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution and saw the picture magazine as a vehicle for aiding German workers in their struggle against capitalism.

  When AIZ began, obtaining photographs that addressed workers’ concerns from the leading picture agencies was difficult. Münzenberg developed a strategy to encourage societies of amateur photographers who would, in turn, become photo correspondents. In Hamburg, in 1926, he established the first Worker Photographer group, which grew into a network of viable shooters throughout Germany and the Soviet Union. He further founded a magazine called Der Arbeiter Fotograf (The Worker Photographer), which offered technical and ideological assistance.

  Bertolt Brecht once wrote Münzenberg that “the camera can lie just like the typesetting machine. The task of AIZ to serve truth and reproduce real facts is of immense importance, and, it seems to me, has been achieved splendidly.” Actually, while the photographs in AIZ were objective accounts of workers’ triumphs, the layouts often served to heroicize (and therefore politicize) the activities covered. Except for its ideological orientation, AIZ was really no different than the Nazi counterpart, the Illustrierte Beobachter (founded in 1926), which employed similar photojournalistic conventions. But when the Nazis assumed power in 1933, AIZ was deemed contraband.