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In midcentury America, visionary art directors at Bazaar and Vogue published radical images by groundbreaking photographers such as Robert Frank and Lisette Model. An exhibit at the Jewish Museum in New York shows the accomplishments - and the compromises - of avant-garde artists working in fashion.
The Vanished Glamour of Midcentury Print Media
Great examples of photography and editorial design abound at the Jewish Museum. (Catch the catalog, too.)
The Vogue cover of March 15, 1945, features a blurred model behind a frosted glass panel emblazoned with a red cross, photographed by Erwin Blumenfeld and art-directed by Alexander Liberman. It is “scary and sad to think that no mainstream fashion title would now publish a cover this bold,” our critic says.Credit.Erwin Blumenfeld, via Condé Nast
April 29, 2021
In a city whose news kiosks have become glorified chewing gum emporiums, where the Grand Central newsstand shelves are overtaken by chips and phone chargers, one of my few remaining happy places is Casa Magazines. It’s a hole of a shop on the corner of Eighth Avenue and 12th Street, and every wall and every inch of floor heaves with obscure, international fashion and design publications, for a dwindling class of print lovers. (I still remember, when I founded a magaz
I am a street photographer. I walk the streets and take pictures. Sometimes I do it for a particular reason. And sometimes I just do it.
My fingers are itching to trip the shutter while I’m having my first cup of morning coffee.
My camera is the perfect modern contraption. With it I can pluck pictures out of thin air.
When I first saw the pictures of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander – the list goes on and on of talented street photographers – I knew that’s what I wanted to do. Just walk around New York City with a camera shooting pictures. Walk around America with a camera.
I arrived at “Modern Look,” the Jewish Museum’s newest exhibit, ready for what it promised: a bird’s-eye view of midcentury magazine photography. But I was preoccupied, as I have been for weeks, with a very different media moment.
The recent documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” which showed how exploitative coverage eroded the singer’s mental health, has prompted a collective double-take at the media culture of the 2000s, when body-shaming, hypersexualization, and pointlessly cruel takedowns ruled the day. We may associate those tactics with tabloids, but they were also on display at prestige magazines: One particularly leering piece that resurfaced in the film’s wake was a 2004 Rolling Stone profile of Lindsay Lohan, which started out by assuring the reader that the 18-year-old’s “breasts are real.”