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The Graphic Design Elements of New York Magazine
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( New York Magazine )
Milton Glaser, Walter Bernard, Charles Slackman, Sol Mednick are the guests in this episode of New York Magazine. They discuss how good illustration can add meaning to a story and the role of art director in a magazine setting.
Audio courtesy of the NYC Municipal Archives WNYC Collection
WNYC archives id: 151708
Municipal archives id: T4775
This is a machine-generated transcript. Text is unformatted and may contain errors.
Welcome to another edition of NEW YORK MAGAZINE our program today deals with the design and graphics of the magazine Our guests are Milton Glaser design director of The New York magazine and a partner in one of the top graphic studios in the city pushpin Walter Bernard the magazine's art director Charles Lachman a noted illustrator whose work appears in many major magazines and so Mednick the well known New York photographer recently while discussing the look of New York Magazine's Mr Glaser said the graphic support the literary content rather than repeat it they form a parallel experience Mr Glazer would you explore that a bit further for us yes to explain that idea. Perhaps more specifically there's always been a tradition in illustration that the function of illustrations to sensually to say the same thing as the words which is say that the graphic material would repeat. And intensify the literary material and so in illustrated book when you have a situation of a guy sitting seated in a room smoking a cigarette. Describe very explicitly by the text what would happen is you get a picture of a guy seen in a room smoking a cigarette and this is a very pervasive. Way to illustrate in the still in fact the most. Frequently encountered. Manner of illustration he was illustration in the broadest sense but what I think is more interesting and what we try to get into in the magazine very frequently. Is a kind of. Series of. Illustrations that parallel or amplify an aspect of the text without repeating it or form a kind of story that runs concurrently that is related to the text but does not give you the exactly the same kind of information perhaps I could refer to something that I just did for the magazine series of Australians for story out that we had a very tough powerful story and Fetim in that Gail Sheehy did where the text described the very specific. Situation of a couple living on the Lower East Side and with very graphic description of what their lifestyle was lie again the room that they lived in and so on and that could have been illustrated in a very specific way in terms of exactly that kind of information and what I didn't stand was. To do a series of illustrations that investigated. A psychic situation that was occurring rather than a physical situation so that the there are things in the illustration that don't occur or literally in the text and vice versa and as a result they kind of interact and form two separate things that work together hey this is all too theoretical but perhaps for our audience now it might be interesting to talk about what are not directed does want to know straight it does and. How material a structure it sent out then what comes back maybe we can talk about that water in terms of how we put the magazine together when we have a story and we have to illustrate it well essentially we were confronted each week with a series of pieces which. Run you know magazine without. With can continue. In a series in which. It does not continue in the following week or in the back of the book and therefore we write about three or four goals which have to be illustrated in as Milton hopefully says a parallel amount which. Must be illustrated within a series of four or five or six pages which presents a unique problem I think for the art director as well as the illustrator because rather than making one specific statement he sometimes has to stretch the statement for three or four pages or make four separate statements and all that to carry the visual aspect of the magazine. Trial slacking off for instance is confronted with one and then in the next issue in which he has four pages to make a parallel statement. Which normally can be said part perhaps in and want to straighten. Maybe tell us about your approach to that Adam Smith article you know it's all I could hope to do to make a permanent statement especially in terms of that particular piece I don't know that it will carry more than one general idea because that's going to start talking about it was straight in words in the text I think that went out with liberty and Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post where the words say John kissed Mary in the moonlight you got a boy you've got a girl you've got a moon. For about ten years illustration has become more of an adjunct to a piece of fiction or nonfiction rather than specifically a pictorial ization of the words because if you just have. That the same thing reiterated it's pointless it's redundant and frankly nobody cares so that you've got to offer more now that that's not to say that there was traitors going to offer any great insights into this story at best I suspect you can offer some kind of insight into who he is and what his views on the specific thing are but certainly no more how much direction do you like to get when you get a manuscript would you rather have a manuscript in which you just given the amount of space and go with it or do you prefer to have your specific know. Truthfully. It's got to do with the thing about he governs best to governs least I would much prefer as a vain. Self gratifying independent. Freelance illustrator type to just get a piece of copy and the instructions that I have X. amount of space as many colors as the thing has and two weeks more than I really need but we get even for those five things that you just Kristie to get at least you're not confined you know the problem is a little different than photographic illustration solve because. There's a certain kind of limitation on the amount of manipulation you can do and how far away from the real materials you can deal with. But. Essentially I suspect there still is a fundamental problem of how you do something without repeating what is a reading of that and how you make an illustration of photographic illustration interesting in terms of piece of literary material. Well. For photographic illustration that there is some. Large difference because you're always dealing with real objects if I ask Charlie slack in a drawer cube he could sit down and draw cube of fire and asked illustrate a cube I have to go out and find a cube so that you're always working. With some aspect of a real object when you're working out. In real time even fictional events if you do them they're done at this moment no other moment. The I think the use of photographs in that illustration. For magazine seems to function better because your magazine I think does not deal especially with. Fictional literature not short stories no romances no murder mysteries it's pretty much the material that is essay. Articles rep retards and so that isn't quite a different flavor that would hardly be amenable to the typical old fashioned romantic magazine illustration. In working with photographer illustrations which often what you want is the target for direct confrontation with an event whether the event is a real event or a fictional event that he manufactures but you try to. Transmute just as the artist as you tried to transmute the. Physical Presence of the objects there by whatever means you have at hand and often those means may be. Just the most characteristic quality of the camera in the photograph it is so detailed and so carefully drawn and so well presented that nobody could hope to manage it and illustrators do manage it they are inevitably confronted with the idea that they're influenced by photography in a large measure for use photographs now that's a very interesting thing because. What you're trying to achieve very often is the illusion of reality I mean that's the problem very often you face in photography. That certain things because of fact of the photograph everybody believes that they're real whereas we know that what you're engaged in more often than not is convincing somebody that the unreal is real and that is more an aspect of photography than than dealing with reporting on an event in a sense at least in the way that we use photography more often we use it to convince people that a fake situation has a real basis which is one reason why actually photography is almost the best medium for surrealism. That exists because you really get the tension between a sense of the real and the observer it was how do you know what you know is there but that the situation is palpably unreal right I think though this is an outgrowth of. The way water and you see illustration. That it would be very easy for an illustrator with photography to go the other way to illustrate certain things that are very very real and convincingly so you would never know that event did not take place I think typical of that point of view. That is the part of you were really reflects what you feel about Australian as one has done recently with the salad bowl and the Greens being tossed except that the Greens consist of dollar and foreign ten dollar and fifty dollar bills and our whole thing is obviously there you would never imagine that a situation would occur where people would eat this except in some madhouse. But what we're trying to do there is to make that twist that everything is convincing except that one very small point of the pepper shaker the waiter is real napkins are real everything's very real except we wanted to make a yeah and this this in photography can be manipulated very very widely you know from direct presentation to images which are almost. Non-representational and that's very interesting point actually well because that's a kind of thing for instance that. Could conceivably have been done in the astray shall just say you have to a drawing of two people and a waiter mixing a salad. But you wouldn't get the same kind of extraordinary edge you get when. A situation looks real and suddenly you discover second time around that it's absurd that instead of the salad greens you have dollar bills and there's that seems to me a very good way to use photographic illustration on one level on the other hand there's some times where. The photographic overstretching is intended only to convey information Francis when you shop. Across the soup picture you want picture like that what you really want to convey is the essential texture quality color the physical properties of what you're doing without in a sense going anything else doing anything else while this is this is this stark a sort of first position for Tarver second position of talk after its initial sort of invention or discovery but it. Was such a frontal approach to anything that existed with absolutely no problem selection was nothing just the idea that the camera would present that instant of time and manipulate time rather than other factors which artist a traditionally manipulated sometimes a camera does both it seems to me to. As you mentioned in the case of food sometimes when you're trying to show for instance a traditional dinner of some sort as in one case only did the pink bunny that you found well also in the dish right what does it depend Bernie a pink bunny is a dish that was used in World War two I believe when people didn't have very much money was made of I think of tomato. Crackers she a little know some cheddar cheese and some charities you know in order to photograph that we created the dish which was real and we were trying to convey show what the dish was in fact look what it looked like however the atmosphere the oilcloth the the way the picture was presented was to recreate a mood of the times and was not real was was fictional and probably was a little idealized as a fact so that it combined what an artist might bring to it as well as showing the dish for what I think the average magazine average magazine reader or viewer what have you. Stops short of thinking of the camera as an interpretive tool for instance he knows because he has a box brownie or a Polaroid that home that the camera records for instance if you watch the telly and you see all these great animated creatures going to be a ball and they have their own little adventure but at the end when it comes to the product the box of a bow Krispies you cut to a photograph of the thing because nothing is as real is a photograph which in itself is basically false or not there's an interesting. Little historical note about the belief in photography sometime during the middle eighteen hundreds the belief that photography really showed what was going on with that extraordinary powerful one and this was used as a proof that spirits existed and photographers of having been discovered by accident or intent double exposures were able to produce what they called spirit photographs the fact that it was a photograph was the convincing part of that you Norma's belief in this event because of the photographs credibility because it had never known anything else from its inception I mean it wandered back and forth through history but I think maybe you know so much tension being paid photography that we're missing the whole aspect of the magazine Well we try to actually employ both when they use well but to just one more point about photography which is sort of interesting people now I think accept the fact simultaneously that a photograph is real they also accept the fact that you can do anything you want with a photograph for instance on the cover that we shot which was of a on the women's liberation movement we had a very beautiful model and. Raising her clenched fist with an arm that obviously belonged to weightlifter. Most people who saw the cover thought it was her arm even though it's so out of scale that you couldn't imagine anybody with a make women there and then they're. Having enough of that now. Everybody every the people who didn't. Perhaps they were twenty three percent of people I talked to didn't believe that it was our assumed that you could make a photograph look like anything you want anyhow there was nothing that you could manipulate photographically so there wasn't any even any question about whether it was real or fake it was just an acceptance of the fact that whatever you want to do photographically could be done by virtue of tricks in the dark Roma airbrushing or whatever else actually we did a very simple solution was simply restaurant head on a guy's arm and took it from an angle where it was convincing recovered and when I had covered the. Different people but it's interesting that these two things now exist simultaneously in terms of reality that people are on one hand completely convinced about the reality of something that is clearly absurd in terms of logic and on the other hand that they're willing to accept the fact that anything you want to represent photographically you can do by some kind of trickery and manipulation but this raises a question that come into a completely different area of that X. and perception and all these things which I you know would be great to talk about some other time never well everybody because of. Their You can talk about it like talk about it so I was very yeah but the business dreariest discussions in the history of Western man like to. The word in code talking about capital a capital our capital it's. Incredibly dull So let's talk about other things like art direction whatever one of the things that's happened with our magazine I don't know how you saw it at the beginning Milton but the the documentary part of the magazine has faded if it ever did exist but only because the documentary is faded it seems to me and in magazines that we have it on television and we can see the war and the event at night and therefore we have to be more interpretive even in so fast the media as a weekly when we thought that was you know much faster went on and I say something about that. This may have faded and it's from its grand tradition of fifteen or twenty or thirty years ago but I think the idea of repertoire was and simply a photograph of events that take place in front of the photographer and camera are quite possible what you're looking at is I suppose possibly photographers who have not. Change their ideas of what repertoire should be there is a minute maybe maybe repertoires as of some other day I'm quite sure that just as everything else changes the nature of repertoire was changed today but I don't think it's entirely Vatsal because I think what's happened is that the kind of stories that really turned you around when life first started to do. That particular kind of journalism no longer evoke any response in terms of a view was reading of them partially I think because of television in fact that now you can not only see the event but see it in motion and hear. And accompanying track to it without that that the inherent drama being able to go and see a man shot in the street or an accident occur or go to a ball and see everybody then sing and still pictures no longer exists in terms of what we've come to expect as information I don't know what comes up I think that it exists I think perhaps we haven't seen too much of it but I guess this in some other way in and take a look at Alliant magazine on the maps life is not a good place to look but you may have to look at those photographers who aren't published yet the magazines certainly the very large ones in very trail the field let's try it that's true but the nature of New York magazine for instance is has changed somewhat it's no longer repertoires magazine it can be a while mostly because you can't depend on extraordinary things to happen while an extraordinary person is there observed one doesn't cover an event for a weekly thing you know you really you know your hands have to generate a different primed excitement and interest in your cable if you know if a dynamite story came in. That was beautifully photographed and was about a critical issue we obviously run it immediately and assume that it would be very effective but that simply doesn't happen that the events are covered in an ordinary way see guys standing. On a table or your very really get that fantastic series of images that really can and will impress you will you have them often just just when you mention events sometimes it's the events are unusual enough doesn't make any difference what you have any kind of photograph or worst snapshot in the world thirty years ago of what an atom bomb looked like would have been a heroic time to give back information not anymore but certainly the moon photographs today. Are the photographs that really take us here is a vet no matter how bad that photograph looks being transmitted from space and certain the ones we've seen reproduced in Motion Picture their credibility is in as absolutely stunning ever seen on television Yeah yeah this is the point I wanted to make girl you flew by this whole thing sorry Well I have a drug that will take well now so drawing the moon thing on the television I imagine you stayed up and sat there like some kind of jerk for two hours watching Little Fuzzy guys go about their business or planting flags and Broomsticks whatever they did you going to be arrested after we leave this place but it only if he's lucky register until I say the same rotten fuzzy picture printed fuzzier in the mornings times the day following that made it real because I could hold it in both hands and study it out and I think that so-called repertory photography still has a place is there such a thing is represented growing sure yes only very limited Lee Now last time I saw it was on television when they couldn't get into the courtroom and they claimed in the trial no but Bob story and. I had to kind of so it's been interesting and. We didn't get too deeply into the problem illustration of such but. Perhaps another time we can round it up and get into some other aspects of New York magazine problems and problems of illustration in general and that concludes another New York magazine broadcast with us today where Milton Glaser design director of New York magazine and a partner in one of the top graphic studios in the city pushed Ben Wilder Bernard the magazine's art director Charles Slackman a noted illustrator whose work appears in many major magazines and sold Mednick the well known New York photographer for your free copy write to New York magazine W N Y C New York one hundred zero seven and join us again next week at this time for another of these broadcast.