Magazine Design Process Book - Sullivan Dyvad by Sullivan Dyvad

Process Book: Magazine Design

Sully Dyvad | VISC 202 | Fall 2017 | Andrea Herstowski

Mario Sorrenti Mario Sorrenti exploded on to the fashion scene in the 1990s, largely due to his sexually charged editorial work, published in American and Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photographer told Interview “I’m pretty open. I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality. It’s part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York . In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career. I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion… Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81? I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived?

I was really young then, ten years old. I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right? I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art—studying painting and sculpture—and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my

friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93—you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right? You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’ No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like…

Invincible? I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month. Okay, very last question: what advice would you give a young photographer just starting out? I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have an idea and you figure it out, you can come back.’ From that day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

Sources: Business of Fashion https://www.businessoffashion.com/community/people/ mario-sorrenti Monster Children http://www.monsterchildren.com/47701/mario-sorrenti/

Alexis Primous, styled by Edward Enniful. W Magazine, September 2015.

Word List Dramatic Otherworldly Colorful

Refined Cultured Smooth Uptight

Intimate

Sensual

Close Serious Cinematic Striking

Fearless Eye-Catching Fun Modernist Formal Static Ambivalent Emotionless Elegant Theatrical Crisp Vivid Deliberate Sharp Stimulating Detached

Provocative Feminine Bold Statuesque Rigid Artificial Grandiose High-Contrast Staged Stylish Bombastic Self-Important Confident Unbothered High-Class Sophisticated

dramatic - striking in appearance or affect; suitable or characteristic of a dramatic story. initimate - closely acquainted, familiar, close; private and personal. provocative - causing annoyance, anger, or another strong reaction, especially deliberately. sophisticated - having, revealing, or proceeding from a great deal of worldly experience and knowledge of fashion and culture; developed to a high degree of complexity. sensual - of or arousing gratification of the senses and physical, especially sexual, pleasure. heartless - heaving no heart; displaying a complete lack of feeling or consideration.

Heartless Professional Precise Feigned Vibrant

Other Titles Fashionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Unseen Genius

Word Combinations Cold Intimacy Unbothered Elegance Otherworldly Ambivalence Bold Theatricality Detached Confidence Playful Precision

Quotes “It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.”

“I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality.”

“It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography [...] slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way.”

“If you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.”

Lee Friedlander A master of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander is known for his exploration of the American social landscape. Friedlander combines his own psyche with the chaotic, ever-changing elements of the street to convey a true urban America. We take a closer look at the artist’s life and work. Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a “fascination with the equipment,” in his words. His first paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog for a local madam named Peggy Plus. He later attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles to become a professional photographer, but left almost immediately. In 1956 he moved to New York and began freelancing. Because of his love of jazz he found work producing album covers. He sought magazine assignments and eventually met people in New York who would change his life: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Richard Avedon, and, from a previous generation, Walker Evans. Friedlander and his new friends, along with innovative curators like John Szarkowski and Nathan Lyons, changed the course of American photography in the 1960s and 70s. He and Maria DiPaoli were married in 1958 and moved to a small town on the Hudson River where they live today. Landscapes, nudes, portraits and nature studies; Lee Friedlander has experimented with almost every subject matter since he first began taking pictures. However, the genre that runs like a thread through every phase of the artist’s work is without a doubt the “American social landscape.” Friedlander used the expression in 1963 to describe the core of his oeuvre in Contemporary Photography, a magazine that ceased publication after a few issues. The term would stick with Friedlander, however, for the rest of his career; more so, it would describe the main focus of an entire generation of American photographers. Friedlander was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, 1962 and 1977. He had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963 and was a part of The Photographer’s Eye at the MoMA a year later. However, the most important exhibition of his early career was John Szarkowski’s landmark show New Documents in 1967. The exhibition proved a positive catalyst for Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander who became icons of contemporary photography over night. In the press release Szarkowski writes, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it. Their work betrays sympathy – almost affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value.” Friedlander plays with shadows, angles and obstacles which he uses to frame elements and structure his compositions. His own shadow or reflection can be found in countless pictures throughout the years. Friedlander clearly identifies himself as a part of the

American life he aims to capture. Furthermore, his selfportraits underline a necessary truth of photography, more precisely un-manipulated photography: the presence of the photographer is inevitable. Different than painters or sculptures, the photographer lives what he captures. The picture is proof of what he saw and where he was. It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears — or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity. And because photographs look so much like seeing, this process threatens our possession of our own vision. It could be said that Lee Friedlander has made a lifelong job of trying to reverse this phenomenon. He marches straight into the heart of enemy territory, grabs photography by the throat, using its own weapons against it, and forces it to give us back the use of our eyes. Lee Friedlander has received recognition for his work since the beginning of his career. Critics and experts speak his name among those of distinguished masters of photography. His significance was reaffirmed in 2005 and 2008, when the Museums of Modern Art in New York City and San Francisco organized a retrospective of Friedlander’s photographs.

Sources: Culture Trip: Capturing the ‘Real’ America https://theculturetrip.com/north-america/usa/washington/articles/lee-friedlander-composing-the-real/ ASX - Just Look At It http://www.americansuburbx.com/2010/02/theory-leefriedlander-just-look-at-it.html

Self Portrait, 1970.

William S. Borroughs, DNC, 1968.

MIT, 1986, from At Work.

New York City, 1966

Fran Lebowitz, 1983.

Portrait, 1985.

Sandra Fisher, 1975.

Maria Friedlander, 1961.

Derek Jeter, 1997.

Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Morris, 1958.

Susan Sontag From “In Plato’s Cave” from On Photography (1977) Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched,

doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective

transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses

for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Sources: In Plato’s Cave from On Photography (1977) http://www.susansontag.com/SusanSontag/books/onPhotographyExerpt.shtml

Photograph of dead Communards, 1871.

The Terminal, Alfred Stieglitz, 1893.

Portrait of Allie Mae Burroughs for the Farm Security Administration, Walker Evans, 1935.

Herb Lubalin Born March 17, 1918, Herb Lubalin was a world-renowned and deeply respected graphic designer, primarily remembered today for his prolific editorial work for various magazines. Most of these magazines - which included Avant Garde, Eros, and Fact (three of Ralph Ginzburg’s publications) - were mainly known for the distinctive, visually stunning art styles that they held under Lubalin’s direction. In particular, Avant Garde - the magazine that Lubalin is perhaps best known for his work on - had an incredibly unique visual identity, driven by Lubalin’s logogram that served as the inspiration for the typeface (also titled Avant Garde) that he would eventually design. While working for this magazine, Lubalin was given a great deal of creative freedom, and due to Avant Garde’s unconventional 11.25 x 10.75” page format, was allowed and encouraged to experiment. This led to the distinctive content that he is now revered for, including full-page typographic titles.

experimentation and variety of style, but his work is noteworthy also simply because it was ahead of its time - he expanded the range of what was considered possible or visually pleasing in the world of magazine design, and his influence can still be seen today in work from many different fields as well.

A great deal of Lubalin’s work - especially that which is remembered today - could be considered “illustrative typography” due to its consistent aversion to the minimalist, modern aesthetic that is commonly seen in typographic design. Much of this work is also commonly compared / likened to the Art Deco movement. While he’s mostly publicly acknowledged and appreciated for his various and effective typographic contributions to the aforementioned magazines, he also served as an art director for The Saturday Evening Post, a magazine very different than Ginzburg’s in terms of both style and content, in the early 1960s. He redid their logo in their 1961, sizing down “The Saturday Evening” and placing it within the O of “Post,” playing off of the fact that the magazine is often colloquially referred to as simply “The Post.” He contributed various interior spreads to the magazine as well, continuing his trend of imaginative layout design while simultaneously altering his visual style in order to best fulfill each publication’s needs. Later in life, Lubalin founded a publication of his own in the form of a typographic journal called U&lc (Upper and lowercase) Magazine. This allowed him to enjoy yet another expansion to his already great deal of creative freedom. U&lc was published by the International Typeface Corporation, which Lubalin co-founded with Aaron Burns and Edward Rondthaler, for the purpose of featuring and displaying the company’s new typefaces (including the aforementioned Avant Garde in 1970). Just like many of the magazines that he worked on, Lubalin was quite dividing and controversial. His design philosophy and style was radically different than most magazine design at the time. Many praised him for effectively portraying the meaning of words through their typography, while others were apprehensive because of his deviation from the norms of the time. This is typical for visionary creatives; people often resist change even if it’s a step forward, which Lubalin’s work undoubtedly was. Deviation from what is expected is always at least somewhat beneficial for the sake of

Sources: AIGA http://www.aiga.org/medalist-herblubalin Society of Publication Designers http://www.spd.org/2014/10/herb-lubalin-redesigns-the-sat.php History of Graphic Design http://www.historygraphicdesign.com/the-age-of-information/the-new-york-school/681-herb-lubalin

Esquire Magazine Esquire Magazine, founded 1933 by Arnold Gingrich, David A. Smart, and Henry L. Jackson, is a magazine marketed toward men. Gingrich was the founder that primarily focused on the magazineâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s publication, which is known for its consistently unique art direction well throughout the first few decades of Esquireâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s life.

Source: History of Design: Esquire Magazine http://www.historygraphicdesign.com/the-age-of-information/the-new-york-school/1085-esquire-magazine The Art Directors Who Made Esquire History http://www.historygraphicdesign.com/the-age-of-information/the-new-york-school/1085-esquire-magazine

Alexey Brodovitch Alexey Brodovitch, born in 1898 in the area of the Russian Empire now known as Belarus, was a creative giant mostly recognized for his contributions to the evolution of typography and graphic design (although he originally pursued a career in painting and contributed to many other artistic fields). Specifically, he is inarguably best known for the work he did as art director of popular American fashion magazine Harper’s Bazaar, a position he held for nearly 25 years. There, he crafted countless iconic covers for the publication, blending simple yet effective typography with photographic or illustrative elements in a new and refreshing way to make a lasting impression on the audience while creating a strong brand identity for Harper’s Bazaar. Specifically when working with photography (a field that he himself directly dabbled in on occasion), Brodovitch had a distinctive taste for imaginative and cinematic photographs of models that served as wonderful juxtapositions to the more clean typography found on the cover alongside it. Although the Harper’s Bazaar covers are probably the pieces of work that Brodovitch is primarily remembered for, the variety of his spreads found within the very same magazines continues to be a vital, innovative, and influential portion of his portfolio even some 70 or 80 years after the fact. Like the covers, these layouts were incredibly inventive, often involving the same types of images and text. Brodovitch also tended to utilize a version of surrealism in these works, dramatically cropping images beyond recognition, juxtaposing them with odd / unexpected elements, and manipulating them through means such as blurring or physically tearing various images. He was also known to manipulate his text; particularly, the designer regularly changed the shape of blocks of text in order to mimic or otherwise complement a form found in an image on the same spread. Furthermore, his layouts stood apart from others at the time also due to his use of bright and eyecatching colors, an element that was pretty uncommon - especially in the world of fashion publication. While all of these characteristics are necessary to understand Brodovitch’s unique identity as a creator, perhaps his most important trait as a designer was his unending value and creative utilization of white space in his compositions. He valued it so much, in fact, that the writers and editors often had to leave off content in order to accommodate his vision for white space, much to their collective frustration. Outside of the portion of his life in which he revolutionized magazine design through his prolific output of design work at Harper’s Bazaar, he also explored the field of graphic design through other outlets. At the start of his career, he did a significant amount of work in the field of advertising, and initially made his name as a designer through various poster designs. Through it all, there remains a constant thread in the form of an undying aim of perfection along with fresh techniques that revolutionized graphic design (and more specifically, magazine design) forever.

Sources: AIGA http://www.aiga.org/medalist-alexeybrodovitch Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexey_Brodovitch

Jonathan Hoefler Jonathan Hoefler is a typographer best known for his original typeface designs. Specifically, he is known for crafting unique typefaces for magazines such as Rolling Stone, The New York Times Magazine, and Sports Illustrated (which is why he is on this list).

Source: NYT - 2 Type Designers, Joining Forces and Faces http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/19/nyregion/2-type-designers-joining-forces-and-faces.html

Gail Anderson Gail Anderson, born in New York in 1962, is an American graphic designer who, like many other designers being researched, was awarded an AIGA medal for her artistic work. She attended the famous School of Visual Arts in her home state where she was educated by another famous graphic designer, Paula Scher. Anderson is included on this list because the large bulk of her work is in the field of “commercial art,” where she focuses on publication design and has worked on layouts for everything from books to magazines.

Arts in New York City. While this undoubtedly puts her in a position of influence over the select few students that have the privilege of learning from her, she also serves as a source of influence for graphic designers on a larger scale due to her innovative and ineteresting work.

Although she started her career working as a designer for Vintage Books and later engaged in the process of creating graphics for various advertisements, her most significant work - both in terms of renown and within the context of our project - is without a doubt her magazine design. She worked for two years as a designer for The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine where she helmed multiple successful cover designs. Later, she reached new heights as an artist in the field of publication design when she became the Senior Art Director of Rolling Stone - a position which she maintained for 15 years. There, she created stunning, attention grabbing layouts for the magazines’ covers, commonly utilizing visual elements (particularly typefaces) that would typically be shunned in the graphic design community, like Showcard Gothic and other similarly “spooky” fonts. Celebrities featured on these covers include Gillian Anderson and the members of bands the Foo Fighters and NSync (which was spread out in a series of five cover designs, with each member getting their own version). Besides the covers, she also worked on numerous spreads for Rolling Stone, each one carrying a completely different visual style than the last. These are perhaps the most relevant of her works, as her creative handling of spread layouts seems to be much more influential and significant than the covers of hers that I saw. Specifically, although each has a distinctive style as mentioned before, there seem to be two major categories of Anderson’s Rolling Stone spreads: those which are comprised of one major image stretching across both pages, and those which feature two pages that are so incredibly distinct that it’s hard to find much in common between them. There seems to be no in between for Anderson, who pairs full bleed images and visually bold type treatments time and time again. The type has no consistent style or approach either, occasionally crowding and overlapping while other times looking completely organized and premeditated. While the former of the two categories mentioned before is relatively uncommon when it comes to designing magazine spreads, the latter is not. Her tendency to think of spreads as grids with only two halves as opposed to the more divided, complex grids of other designers serves as her main point of influence in the field. Aside from the design, she also has written numerous books in collaboration with Steven Heller and followed in her early influencer Paula Scher’s footsteps by becoming an educator herself at the very same School of Visual

Sources: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gail_Anderson_(graphic_designer) AIGA http://www.aiga.org/medalist-gailanderson Official Website http://www.gailycurl.com/

David Carson Born September 8, 1955, David Carson is a famous graphic designer / art director / typographer known (of course) for his work in the magazine industry. He is perhaps most renowned for his association with the grunge typography movement, playing a major part in defining what work in the movement looks like and spawning many imitators in the process.

subtle way, incorporating certain techniques / details / ideas without resorting to imitation.

Grunge typography is a controversial category of graphic design, marginalizing and angering many that prefer traditional modernist approaches to design by way of clean type and easily / instantly recognizable visual elements. Grunge typography serves as the antithesis of these characteristics, with its works usually consisting of “dirty” or “messy” looking typefaces such as Morire and distorted / manipulated imagery that contains an unignorable amount of texture. It also differed from traditional and popular design in terms of philosophy, valuing character and emotion more than organization and ease-of-use. David Carson embraced these attributes, believing that design work should have personality (a position that is usually shunned within the graphic design community). This philosophy / style can be traced back to Carson’s career origins, when he served as the art director for Transworld Skateboarding and, a few years later, Transworld Snowboarding. The covers designed for these publications were not quite to the level of “grunginess” that Carson (and others after him) would eventually reach, but the aforementioned personality that he strived for is undoubtedly present. It reaches its peak, however, at the same point that Carson’s career does: the era in which he served as art director for Ray Gun, a music-oriented magazine created in 1992. He held the position and used it to develop and define the grunge typography movement until the magazine’s retirement 8 years later. This publication saw Carson’s best and most grungy work, including covers that were borderline illegible and an interview that had its font changed to the literally illegible Dingbat because the designer considered it “dull.” These things, as mentioned before, served as the primary inspiration for most, if not all, grunge typographers who sought to convey feeling instead of following all of the “rules.” Carson’s work has perhaps the most clear point of influence in regards to this project out of all of the designers researched. Throughout our graphic design education, we have pretty much always been pushed toward the direction of cleanliness, legibility, and modernism, so it’s nice to look to someone who rejects this idea as an influential figure. When designing our covers and spreads, it could be helpful to consider that legibility is not necessarily the most important priority, and we can hopefully get encouraged to experiment with some elements that we typically might not consider. I probably shouldn’t go full-grunge and do something that Carson himself would do, however, as I bet it (ironically) would not get a good grade - but it’s still possible to be deeply inspired by his work in a more

Sources: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Carson_(graphic_designer) The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2013/12/27/5247944/ the-awl-history-of-grunge-typography

Tibor Kalman Hungarian designer Tibor Kalman - born in 1949 was a creative that operated through many different industries, media, and fields of design (including, of course, publication / magazine design). After dropping out of NYU before even getting to the second year, Kalman began his design career by working as a design supervisor in the New York bookstore that would eventually be known as Barnes & Noble. His first brush with the magazine design world was in the early 90s, when he acquired the position of Interview magazine’s creative director. As a magazine founded by Andy Warhol, this was a great achievement and one that jumpstarted his career as a publication designer. When comparing his work for Interview with his later, more famous and influential work, it’s clear that this is also the place in which Kalman began the process of developing his signature style. Around the same time, Kalman delved even deeper into the industry when he made a similar career move by taking up the role of founding editor-in-chief for Colors magazine as well. It is the work done in this position that he is perhaps most well known for, and for good reason: Colors’ covers are visually striking and truly unique, typically consisting of solid colored backgrounds with highly contrasting cut-out images in front below the magazine’s title. First of all, the inclusion of solid colors as backgrounds is a clever design connection to the magazine’s name, as the magazine doesn’t actually have much to do with colors as much as world events. The ability to connect what the words say to the design through which they are conveyed is an important one, and one that we would greatly benefit from during our own designs. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the images when cut out and placed on these backgrounds is immense, so we could also look at Kalman’s work as a source of inspiration when it comes to hierarchy and emphasis in magazine layouts. Although they are largely irrelevant to our process of designing for magazines, Kalman’s other non-editorial works are too noteworthy to ignore. In 1979, he teamed up with two others to form their own design firm called M & Co. Through this firm, Kalman designed for a variety of different industries and purposes, including album artwork and packaging for famous musicians like The Talking Heads and title sequences for films such as The Silence of the Lambs. As mentioned before, Kalman’s influence is of great value to us as we begin the magazine design process because of his unique style and deliberate, intelligent approach to design solutions. It blends the effectiveness and weirdness of David Carson with the practicality and modernism of Alexey Brodovitch in a way that is not even close to derivative and undoubtedly achieves the goal of grabbing attention and holding onto it.

Sources: AIGA http://www.aiga.org/medalist-tiborkalman Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tibor_Kalman

Neville Brody Born on April 23, 1957 in London, England, Neville Brody is a typographer / art director / graphic designer best known (in terms of editorial work) for his design work on magazines like The Face and Arena. Somewhat similar to the work of David Carson, Neville Brody’s design has a tendency to be categorized as experimental and greatly differs from most popular magazine design from the minds of creatives that closely adhere to design traditions, conventions, and norms.

London’s own Royal College of Art as the head of the Communication Art & Design department.

In fact, as a student of the London College of Printing (a school that is relatively conservative when it comes to design traditions and norms), his work was often met with poor reactions from instructors due to its experimental nature. He was incredibly inspired by London’s growing punk scene at the time, and incorporated aesthetic elements from the movement into his own work (often getting him in trouble with authority). This trend continued into his professional career, where his work grew in both its level of experimentation and its quality, expanding the already long list of similarities that Brody shares with David Carson. As becomes clear with the work generated for his role as Art Director of The Face magazine for five whole years, Brody also loosely shares a style with Carson. While not exactly fitting into the grunge typography movement, Brody still utilizes messy elements to create busy compositions that are not immediately decipherable but manage to convey emotion. These interior spreads often feel as if the designer was more concerned with creating art and cluttering the pages with interesting graphical elements than actually conveying the information. Some paragraphs are miniscule compared to the giant, bold, abstract brush strokes surrounding them. This creates an amazing sense of scale that can be used by the designer to create important hierarchy distinctions and make otherwise boring layouts that much more attention grabbing, so it undoubtedly has relevance to us and our magazine layout projects. After his run at The Face, Brody had a slightly shorter time of three years doing the same art director job for another magazine: Arena, this time lasting from 1987 to 1990. The work produced for this publication marks a pretty distinct shift from the layouts designed for The Face, as they are not nearly as saturated and busy. However, just because it’s not in line with his earlier work does not mean that is has no value to us, as we can be inspired to experiment and try new styles in our own designs - and learn from the still-masterful layouts found in Arena. Much like Tibor Kalman, Brody also has work unrelated to publishing design that is worth noting. In 1994, he founded Neville Brody Studio / Research Studios, a company that creates “visual languages” for various third-party companies like Paramount Studios and the BBC. He is also a founding member of Fontworks, a type foundry in London - for which Brody himself has designed over 20 typefaces. He now works at

Sources: Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neville_Brody History of Graphic Design http://www.historygraphicdesign.com/the-age-of-information/postmodern-design/531-neville-brody Design is History http://www.designishistory.com/1980/neville-brody/

Title Experimentation + Customized Solutions

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Cold Intimacy The Work of Mario Sorrenti

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painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

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UNBOTHERED MARIO SORRENTI ELEGANCE THE WORK OF

BY SULLY DYVAD

he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

“I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality.”

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THE WORKS OF MARIO SORRENTI

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BY SULLY DYVAD

Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York . In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work

was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely

what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career. I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion…

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THE WORKS OF MARIO SORRENTI B Y S U L L I VA N DY VA D

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whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York .

In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates

FASHION’S UNSEEN GENIUS

the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion— which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was,

and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

BY S U L L I VA N D Y VA D

LENS

COLD INTIMACY THE WORKS OF MARIO SORRENTI

story by Sully Dyvad pictured: Sasha Pivavarova by Mario Sorrenti

COLD INTIMACY

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Unbothered Elegance Photographs by Mario Sorrenti

Story by Sullivan Dyvad

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

“It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems

honest, whether it’s female or male,

it’s part of me as well.”

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FASHIO UN GENI PHOTOGRAPHS

MARIO SORRENTI

FASHION’S UNSEEN GENIUS

ON’S NSEEN IUS STORY BY SULLIVAN DYVAD

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UNSEEN

GENIUS

FASHION’S UNSEEN GENIUS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIO SORRENTI STORY BY SULLY DYVAD

Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic.

CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

UNBOTHERED

ELEGANCE

PHOTOS BY MARIO SORRENTI

FASHION’S UNSEEN GENIUS

story by Sully Dyvad Mario Sorrenti exploded on to the fashion scene in the 1990s, largely due to his sexually charged editorial work, published in American and Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photographer told Interview “I’m pretty open. I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality. It’s part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the

French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic.

If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

lens

unbothered

photography by Mario Sorrenti story by Sully Dyvad

unbothered elegance

elegance

Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I

was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the

photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

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UNBOTHER ELEGANCE 2

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

story by Sully Dyvad

RED

Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New kind of blur between reality and York. what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw In 2011, Sorrenti published imagery perfectly encapsulates Draw Blood for Proof, a onethe photographer’s unique ability to-one reproduction of an and aesthetic. exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first If you don’t know who he is, you 10 years of my photographic probably don’t care so much career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring he told Interview magazine. “I because those pants look like shit. was shooting Polaroids all the Just sayin’. So a small handful of time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His work was my life, and my life most famous contribution would was my work, and there was a have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the

esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

THE WORK OF MARIO SORRENTI 3

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IN TI MA 2

COLD INTIMACY

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIO SORRENTI

story by Sullivan Dyvad

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THE WORK OF MARIO SORRENTI

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

STORY BY SULLY DYVAD

If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

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“I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and s

featuring photography by Mario

Cold Intimacy

sexuality.â&#x20AC;?

Sorrenti

Cold Intimacy story by Sully Dyvad

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story by sully dyvad Mario Sorrenti exploded on to the fashion scene in the 1990s, largely due to his sexually charged editorial work, published in American and Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photographer told Interview “I’m pretty open. I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality. It’s part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the

If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

the photography of mario sorrenti

fashion’s unseen genius

fashionâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s unseen genius

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THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MARIO SORRENTI STORY BY SULLY DYVAD

COLD INTIMACY

magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic.

Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

THE WORKS OF

MARIO SORRENTI

ELEG-

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

Story by Sullivan Dyvad

ANCE

Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the

photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The

powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

THE WORKS OF MARIO SORRENTI

LENS

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIO SORRENTI

COLD

COLD INTIMACY

STORY BY SULLY DYVAD

LENS

THE WORKS OF MARIO SORRENTI

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

STORY BY SULLIVAN DYVAD

include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a

kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen

it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE THE PHOTOGRAPHY OF MARIO SORRENTI Story by Sullivan Dyvad Pictured: Sasha Pivavarova

Mario Sorrenti exploded on to the fashion scene in the 1990s, largely due to his sexually charged editorial work, published in American and Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photographer told Interview “I’m pretty open. I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality. It’s part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our

fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career. I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion… Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81? I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived? I was really young then, ten years old. I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right?

I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest

in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art—studying painting and sculpture—and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person.

So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93— you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right? You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’

No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible? I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month.

back.’ From that day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

Okay, very last question: what advice would you give a young photographer just starting out? I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have an idea and you figure it out, you can come

Lens

Cold Intimacy

“It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.” story by Sully Dyvad Mario Sorrenti exploded on to the fashion scene in the 1990s, largely due to his sexually charged editorial work, published in American and Italian Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar. The photographer told Interview “I’m pretty open. I’m not afraid of men. I’m not afraid of women. I’m not afraid of sex and sexuality. It’s part of me, and it comes out in the photograph. It’s as if at that moment when I’m taking pictures, I’m not a man and I’m not a woman. If I see a moment that seems true to me, that seems honest, whether it’s female or male, it’s part of me as well.”

Sorrenti cemented his place at the top of the industry by shooting Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of

the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small

handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

lens

unbothered elegance:

photographs by mario sorrenti

story by sullivan dyvad

cold intimacy

Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-toone reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting

Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion— which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as

we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

lens

cold intimacy

the work of mario sorrenti

cold intimacy

Kate Moss in Calvin Klein ’s iconic Obsession campaign. In 2012 alone, Sorrenti shot for Vanity Fair, Vogue Hommes, W, The New York Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-toone reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting

5 Font Studies (Sans + Serif)

Gotham & Baskerville Both typefaces have pretty standard / average character widths, so they make a solid pair. Also, Gotham is a very simple typeface and Baskerville (as a transitional serif face) is middle-of-the-road when it comes to stroke contrast.

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

BODY TEXT 8.5/12pt: Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci dolenim aiorepeliqui occupta spedipidic te vendi dem dolorepercia evenit que voluptate vellupt atibere prepel ma consedi ilit deriore perspitia quatibus mi, consequatem ipsunt ut dolorro rerionsequi sequi dus arcipsandus doluptatqui non es sum conecae qui voluptatus et lab ius dolupta tibusae magnatus mos si berunt laciis aut vel is expelent ad excest, te pre, officaborum quas velessum fuga. Sus doloreptur? Sit, optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOptatis nost, sim lam nobit, odi reprate pelitiorrum quat. Ur alibusam qui illuptas apisse liquibus autemquias vollabo repudipsam, te quid moditatia sequund itatquidus que porem et qui doluptatatem sit quia digent atus am faceatem am, od eossundamus unt rem non et porem es des quamenderem quibusdam ent offic te volut etur, tetures rem ratemo enduciis eossim volupta tiunt.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volorro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

Futura & Didot Futura is a very “square” face, with many characters appearing just as wide visually as they are tall. It also looks incredibly bold because of its geometric style. Didot is a modern serif typeface and therefore has high contrast which complements Futura’s bold, sharp look and similarly has a large character width for a serif face.

Caption: re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta volupt

Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem. Videro conseru mquiantium ad ut acessime accus duntibus magnati anducius vent architi rem sequi vel ea vendem explabo. CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

DIN & Bodoni DIN’s defining characteristic is its narrowness or tallness, which is matched by Bodoni’s relatively small character width. Bodoni’s status as a modern typeface also complements DIN’s thin lines.

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Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Univers & Belizio The two typefaces have similar character widths. Also, Belizio is a slabserif, which is complemented nicely by Universâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s thick lines (in certain fonts).

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Article Title

THIS IS A SUBHEAD INTRO TEXT 14/18PT: Ehenihic totae et, il ipis doloratiberi sed eaquati nverfer uptatem sunt ommodio conet que a aut omnisti busapero inte volum re non exerro veliqui quaecto ex eumquae errorum fuga. Nam ea conectatem. Ignis secta eaquata tectur? Ihit et qui digendi tatiusci voluptatus, quibus doluptatum quodi odiat odioriti aut endionet mod quia ipsandis mo con re parchil in prat excerunte simus sam que molorio vel enis aut ulliquaturit ventusdae. Fugia nulparum iur si comnihit prae exceaqui corem.

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Gotham & Didot While the character widths are slightly different, Didot’s modernity is an amazing fit with Gotham’s very rigid, contemporary look. The variation in thick and thin present in it also serves as a nice contrast to Gotham’s typically consistent look as well.

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Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Univers & Bodoni These two typefacesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; character widths arenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t too different to be a problem, and both have a modern, simple look to them.

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Article Title THIS IS A SUBHEAD

CALL OUTS 24/36 pt

In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae.

Optis nobitat emquas estruptae nis doluptat quatum, qui corerum volor-

ro eici ditiore, ute nullis commo dolorum facerspe sam, explam quidebis as dipis pariore cone officii strundi dello cuptat. Orehent quia voluptur? Ferro et es et odit adios et vernam inciur ratur aut porro odis ex etum esti sapel et quate peribero cus quat ium fugitate estiasp eribus et magnatur? Fuga. Assit quaspitatiis et eumet et quam harum estiistis venimol uptiam quame numquis ea iliaese dissitiur, sapidere nonsequi voluptatiae experias ex ea auta doluptae vellestrum consed quo te doloruptate si as debisciis dit modiate mporemp oribusa nobit perspedit, od miliber ovidebit, sit at aut lab inturio tem consequas ut autatintur moluptis dolupta incipsuOmnitiist aut es ut labor as earion necerum quuntib erferibus, sam restiis ma cores ut harciis aut doluptia qui dolorpor molupta cum eatur? Nobitas event reictotatis pedi odit laborro volore si archilla as aut voloremquias dolorem porume mi, cus volore doluptatam liqui ima as porrum etur atinctem remqui am raturem aut volende rsperferiate nobis quatet, vendendandi volorro cus audipsumquat liquiant omnisim olupta diat omnis acimint quisime cum corit hillo eum ut hiciam, non etur, oditat qui apis aut elit veria ped quaeper ioremol uptaten daecessinum, id milisqui dolorum estrum aut volupta spelecte pla sam, qui dollent paria adioribus reicipi cienimu sciandae doluptam faceat dis si il ipsapita quia delit et, conessi minullab id everiberit mo beati re volest, sandae lab imusam, est vel ipsapellat quassequi vita doloribus mo to et labo. Et ulluptatur am fugit magnihil et aces aliquam endis modis essin nimoluptatem dolorum suntur sam conecer sperum ne min reperspedit hario. Hic te explatem sinum nonsequi berrum ventur autem. Nam quas explis eiusti. In re et que etustest, qui remquatur abo. Dam facerem que ilitati andenim quae etur repe sundipis voluptiis sint velendi iliatiis ipicipsae. Feriati dolupta voluptatur? Agnationsed exerem velestisquam facilla pedit eosti sintiam utem quisti custore raecto blandus andisi quis et lique es sed maximil ellatur epudit voluptas aut plitati busdae paruntis ut volo te net alignih itassit ationsecti cum quis ex entusciam vendebis dolupti cum raeratur? Qui coresequo iliam sequatum ne ratentis antur, odit vendese ditiundaes non res nam dis coreper ationest, elicillut que pa sed magnatur maio doluptas nosamenduci Sus doloreptur?

3 Initial Opening Article Designs

LENS

the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

LENS

“I’M NOT A “I’M NOT AFRA I’M NOT I’M NOT AFR I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion… Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81? I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived? I was really young then, ten years old. I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody

to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right? I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her

with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art—studying painting and sculpture—and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and

I’M N SEX

COLD INTIMACY

AFRAID OF MEN. RAID OF MEN. AFRAID OF WOMEN. RAID OF WOMEN. those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an

incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93—you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right?

I’M NOT AFRAID OF SEX AND SEXUALITY.”

NOT AFRAID OF X AND SEXUALITY.” 5

LENS

“IT’S AS I WHEN I’ NOT A M IF I SEE TRUE TO WHETHE IT’S PAR

COLD INTIMACY

IF AT THAT MOMENT ’M TAKING PICTURES, I’M MAN AND I’M NOT A WOMAN. “IT’S AS IF AT THAT MOMENT A MOMENT THAT SEEMS WHEN I’M TAKING PICTURES O ME, THAT SEEMS HONEST, NOT A MAN AND I’M NOT A W ER IT’S FEMALE OR MALE, IF I SEE A MOMENT THAT SE RT OF ME AS WELL.” TRUE TO ME, THAT SEEMS H WHETHER IT’S FEMALE OR M IT’S PART OF ME AS WELL.”

LENS

You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’ No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like…

it out, you can come back.’ From that day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

COLD INTIMACY

LENS

THE WORK OF MARIO SORRENTI

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

STORY BY SULLY DYVAD

Times T, W, Self Service and the French, Italian and Japanese editions of Vogue. Unsurprisingly, Sorrenti’s commercial work is equally popular. His advertising clients include Chanel, Hugo Boss , Max Mara, Kenzo and Barneys New York. In 2011, Sorrenti published Draw Blood for Proof, a one-to-one reproduction of an exhibition he put on in 2004. “The work comes out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the

photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion… Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81? I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived? I was really young then, ten years old. I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right? I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is

months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city;

a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years.

LENS

Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art—studying painting and sculpture—and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics

of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right?

special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93—you were only twentyfour years old. And that was like your big break, right? You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was

Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very

doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twentytwo, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’ No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible? I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month. Okay, very last question: what advice would you give a young photographer just starting out? I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have an idea and you figure it out, you can come back.’ From that

day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

LENS

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

LENS

IN TI MA 2

COLD INTIMACY

story by Sullivan Dyvad

PHOTOGRAPHS BY MARIO SORRENTI out of the first 10 years of my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring

because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘gamechanger’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

LENS

“IT’S FUNNY—WHEN I FIRST STARTED TAKING PICTURES I HAD NO INTEREST IN DOING FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY [...]

COLD INTIMACY

Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was

going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right? I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep

tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I

SLOWLY, BECAUSE MY MUM WAS IN FASHION AND I WAS DOING A LITTLE BIT OF MODELLING, I STARTED LOOKING AT FASHION PHOTOGRAPHY IN A TOTALLY DIFFERENT WAY.”

LENS

COLD INTIMACY

LENS

don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art— studying painting and sculpture— and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your

Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh

friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93— you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right? You know what, I think we did those pictures in ’92. I’m sure we shot them in ’92 and they probably didn’t come out till ’93. I had already started working by the time I shot Obsession, and I already had a contract with Harper’s

That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think.

Bazaar to do six fashion stories a year for them and stuff. The first big shoot I did was for The Face and then I did stuff for, like, English Elle and I was working in England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever

like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’ No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible? I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month.

wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old.

an idea and you figure it can come back.’ From tha I realised if you’re going see somebody, or meet so at a magazine or for some tising campaign or somet you should always go wit idea. Don’t ever go unpre anywhere. Always be read

UNBOTHERED ELEGANCE

out, you at day on to go and omebody e adverthing, th an epared, dy.

October 25th Questions What are the advantages of a multiple column grid? Allowing yourself to utilize multiple columns is beneficial to the designer by giving them more freedom to place elements where they want them in designs that are more complex and contain things like intricate hierarchy and images. Also it - specifically in terms of magazine design - allows for layouts with multiple columns of text. However, adding too many columns to a design’s grid can give too much freedom, defeating the purpose of using a grid at all. How many characters is optimal for a line length? Words per line? 50 - 60 characters is supposedly the ideal range for line length. It’s hard to say what the perfect line length Why is the baseline grid used in design? It creates a sense of rhythm in a layout by reusing similar spacing rules throughout the entire composition. This gives it consistency. What are reasons to set type justified? Ragged (unjustified)? Justified type is more consistent, assuring that the text will be a certain width in order to create a perfect block of text. Ragged text, however, simply looks more organic and works better in most layouts that don’t have specific reasons to use justified type. What is a typographic river? Usually happening just by coincidence, rivers are visual gaps that are formed when similar spaces are seen within close proximity to one another and the reader’s mind puts them together as one solid hole. What does clothesline, hangline or flow line mean? A hangline is a guideline that appears at the top of a layout, usually for the purpose of placing graphic elements above and “hanging” the text from them below. This creates a sense of alignment and consistensy throughout. What is type color/texture mean? Color / texture (in the world of typography) refers to how densely packed together a piece of text’s characters are. Text with large tracking or space between characters appears “lighter” than those with less space. How does x-height effect type color? Depending on how high the x-height is, a line of text could appear larger and therefore become “closer” to the line above it, which would result in a darker color.

What are some ways to indicate a new paragraph. Are there any rules? You can choose from a variety of techniques including using spaces between lines, putting indents / “outdents” at the beginning of paragraphs (on new lines), and including extra space or a graphic element between paragraphs on the same line. The only real “rule” is that you shouldn’t use too many signals or cues, as it confuses the reader. Only one is necessary.

Magazine Cover Research

What makes a these covers successful? While the vast majority of commercially popular magazine covers generally follow the same design trend / format - a full bleed image with a masthead at the top and article details on the sides - I learned through looking for the best covers that this isn’t always the case, and it can pay off to experiment and deviate from the norm a bit (although the “default” layout is undeniably effective and worth trying as well).

that the more information I included, the more content I had to work with; when I included things like the magazine’s price, I could add visual elements like circles to contain the new information that would otherwise be unnecessarily and useless. However, sometimes the lack of information provided the opportunity of minimalism, which is one of the most striking styles found in the magazine covers I chose as successful when researching.

However, the masthead was almost always located at the top of the layout, whether it was centered, aligned to the far left or right, or anywhere in between. Different sizes were played with in the examples I liked, though, and other elements were variable as well - such as whether the masthead is at the very front or is partly obscured by the subject of the image.

Basically, even though there are indisputably a number of calculated and effective design conventions, there is no one right way to design a magazine cover. Just like in any other field of design, sometimes deviating from these norms makes for the best pieces.

One common technique that I observed & appreciated was the use of “frames” on the cover. They greatly varied in size, color, and content (or lack thereof), but despite the variety, they were always effective in two ways: they add a color that creates a stylistic element and adds more personality than would be found in entirely photographic covers, and they put emphasis on the central image as well. As mentioned before, most conventional cover designs include article descriptions that are typically located on the sides. Some covers, however, decided to do away with these descriptions completely, while others put emphasis on the cover story or altered them in some other visually significant way. Besides the essential content - name of the publication, date of the issue, etc. - some covers included extra information, like the price of the magazine itself or a tagline for the publication (usually located directly under or within close proximity to the masthead). Essentially, my biggest takeaway from browsing the internet for my favorite examples of successful magazine covers was that successful layouts embrace experimentation in a way that doesn’t take away from the important information (usually the masthead and central photograph) but still adds visual interest that gives the publication an instantly recognizable identity and style. While the aforementioned successful commercial publications - ranging anywhere from Rolling Stone to Better Homes and Gardens - opt to have an “invisible” design as to not distract from the elements that have the most part in interesting the average readers and getting them to purchase the magazines, the designs with the most value to designers are the ones that sacrifice a bit of this marketablitiy for unique and gripping style (which is equally enticing in its own right, albeit to a different audience). To incorporate these elements of experimentation, I tried out a variety of the techniques I mentioned here in my initial 10 design attempts. I utilized frames a few times with varying sizes and color, and changed how much information I included from attempt to attempt. I found

10 Initial Cover Drafts

NOVEMBER 2017

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER MARIO SORRENTI

NOVEMBER 2017

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER MARIO SORRENTI

LENS

NOVEMBER 2017

M A R I O S O R R E N T I - L E E F R I E D L A N D E R - S U S A N S O N TA G

LENS

n. something that facilitates and influences perception, comprehension, or evaluation n. the light-gathering device of a camera

M A R I O S O R R E N T I - L E E F R I E D L A N D E R - S U S A N S O N TA G

NOVEMBER 2017

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THE WORLDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

P R E M I E R PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE

MARIO SORRENTI

LEE FRIEDLANDER

S U S A N S O N TA G

NOVEMBER 2017

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

COLD INTIMACY THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

MARIO SORRENTI

LENS

NOVEMBER 2017 NO. 20 $4.99

MARIO SORRENTI - LEE FRIEDLANDER - SUSAN SONTAG

NOV ‘17

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PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAG’S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

COLD INTIMACY THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

MARIO SORRENTI

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

NOV 2017

MARIO SORRENTI - LEE FRIEDLANDER - SUSAN SONTAG

NOVEMBER 2017

Final Opening Article Direction + Alternative

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COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

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“IT’S AS IF A WHEN I’M TA I’M NOT A M WOMAN. I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion… Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81? I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived? I was really young then, ten years old. I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody

COLD INTIMACY

AT THAT MOMENT AKING PICTURES, MAN AND I’M NOT A those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy. Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is, in a way; I still have an

IF I SEE A MOMENT THAT SEEMS TRUE TO ME, THAT SEEMS HONEST, WHETHER IT’S MALE OR FEMALE, IT’S PART OF ME AS WELL.” 5

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COLD INTIMACY

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COLD INTIMACY

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COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

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I moved to New York with my mother, my brother and my sister, and for the first six months we lived at a friend’s house. Then my mum found a sweet little apartment in Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it? Yeah, it was very cool. It was a different city than today, that’s for sure. It was

COLD INTIMACY

more dangerous than it is today. I remember growing up in New York and being told by my mum and everybody to always be aware of who’s behind you and don’t look anybody in the eye on the street. It was a very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture

and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right? I have a boy and a girl. So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’? Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs

and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to? It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to

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COLD INTIMACY

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That’s pretty young, though, right? Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think.

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out, you at day on to go and omebody e adverthing, th an epared, dy.

Final Opening Article

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my photographic career — probably the most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. And as much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to have a chat about his life and career.

COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

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I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion…

Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81?

I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived?

Gramercy Park, on 20th and 3rd, and we lived there for a couple of years. And then in maybe ’83 or ’84 we moved to 16th Street and 3rd Avenue and we stayed in that neighbourhood till I was eighteen or nineteen years old. What was the city like when you first got here? Do you remember much about it?

COLD INTIMACY

very intense city; there was a lot of crime, and drugs and violence and stuff. I came from Naples, which, I guess, is not the safest city in the world, so you know, I wasn’t that bothered by it. There was a lot of scrapping. One of the first things after coming to New York was going to school and then getting in fights, making friends, writing graffiti. Some of my first really close friends were kids who were breakdancers and graffiti writers; I went straight into that culture and slowly got really heavily into skateboarding. I worked at a skate shop for some years and stuff… You have two kids, right?

Yeah, totally. We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work all the time. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are kind of helping each other out

constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years. Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to?

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Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer, so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is

doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures when I was eighteen and I didn’t start working professionally till I was at the end of twenty, twenty-one years old. That’s pretty young, though, right?

Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy.

Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is,

COLD INTIMACY

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in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was a very special… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93—you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right?

England so it was a lot of English magazines. Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, and it was a lot of editorial and stuff and then I was doing Dolce & Gabbana and then the Obsession thing happened. It was pretty early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’

No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible?

I really felt invincible. And if I wasn’t taking pictures I was involved in some art project. It felt like I worked all the time, but I really only worked a quarter of the amount I work today. Back then we used to shoot film, so we did one or two jobs a month. Okay, very last question: what advice would you give a young photographer just starting out?

I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have an idea and you figure it out, you can come back.’ From that day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

COLD INTIMACY

2 Historical Article Design Directions

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LEE FRIEDLANDER

Haverstraw, NY, 1966

1963 to describe the core of his oeuvre in Contemporary Photography, a magazine that ceased publication after a few issues. The term would stick with Friedlander, however, for the rest of his career; more so, it would describe the main focus of an entire generation of American photographers.

Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a “fascination with the equipment,” in his words. His first paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog for a local madam named Peggy Plus. He later attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles to become a professional photographer, but left almost immediately. In 1956 he moved to New York and began freelancing. Because of his love of jazz he found work producing album covers. He sought magazine assignments and eventually met people in New York who would change his life: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Richard Avedon, and, from a previous generation, Walker Evans. Friedlander and his new friends, along with innovative curators like John Szarkowski and Nathan Lyons, changed the course of American photography in the 1960s and 70s. He and Maria DiPaoli were married in 1958 and moved to a small town on the Hudson River where they live today.

Friedlander was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, 1962 and 1977. He had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963 and was a part of The Photographer’s Eye at the MoMA a year later. However, the most important exhibition of his early career was John Szarkowski’s landmark show New Documents in 1967. The exhibition proved a positive catalyst for Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander who became icons of contemporary photography over night. In the press release Szarkowski writes, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it. Their work betrays sympathy – almost affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value.”

Landscapes, nudes, portraits and nature studies; Lee Friedlander has experimented with almost every subject matter since he first began taking pictures. However, the genre that runs like a thread through every phase of the artist’s work is without a doubt the “American social landscape.” Friedlander used the expression in

It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears — or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity. And because photographs look so much like seeing, this process threatens our possession of our own vision. It could be said that Lee Friedlander has made a lifelong job of trying to reverse this phenomenon. He marches straight into the heart of enemy territory, grabs photography by the throat, using its own weapons against it, and forces it to give us back the use of our eyes. Lee Friedlander has received recognition for his work since the beginning of his career. Critics and experts speak his name among those of distinguished masters of photography. His significance was reaffirmed in 2005 and 2008, when the Museums of Modern Art in New York City and San Francisco organized a retrospective of Friedlander’s photographs.

Friedlander plays with shadows, angles and obstacles which he uses to frame elements and structure his compositions. His own shadow or reflection can be found in countless pictures throughout the years. Friedlander clearly identifies himself as a part of the American life he aims to capture. Furthermore, his self-portraits underline a necessary truth of photography, more precisely un-manipulated photography: the presence of the photographer is inevitable. Different than painters or sculptures, the photographer lives what he captures. The picture is proof of what he saw and where he was.

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MIT, 1986

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Sandra Fisher, 1975

Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Morris, 1958

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Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1968

New York City, 1966

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Hospital, 2011

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THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY A master of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander is known for his exploration of the American social landscape. Friedlander combines his own psyche with the chaotic, ever-changing elements of the street to convey a true urban America. We take a closer look at the artist’s life and work.

STORY BY MICHÈLE KIEFFER

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Garry Winogrand, Unknown Year

William S Borroughs, 1968

Derek Jeter, 1997

Maria Friedlander, 1961

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MIT, 1986 Sandra Fisher, 1975

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Haverstraw, NY, 1966

New York City, 1966

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Provincetown, Massachusetts

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Mr. and Mrs. Eddie Morris, 1958

s, 1968

Hospital, 2011

Final Historical Article

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LEE FRIEDLANDER

Haverstraw, NY, 1966

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY STORY BY MICHÈLE KIEFFER A master of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander is known for his exploration of the American social landscape. Friedlander combines his own psyche with the chaotic, ever-changing elements of the street to convey a true urban America. We take a closer look at the artist’s life and work. Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a “fascination with the equipment,” in his words. His ﬁrst paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog for a local madam named Peggy Plus. He later attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles to become a professional photographer, but left almost immediately. In 1956 he moved to New York and began freelancing. Because of his love of jazz he found work producing album covers. He sought magazine assignments and eventually met people in New York who would change his life: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Richard Avedon, and, from a previous generation, Walker Evans. Friedlander and his new friends, along with innovative curators like John Szarkowski and Nathan Lyons, changed the course of American photography in the 1960s and 70s. He and Maria DiPaoli were married in 1958 and moved to a small town on the Hudson River where they live today.

Landscapes, nudes, portraits and nature studies; Lee Friedlander has experimented with almost every subject matter since he ﬁrst began taking pictures. However, the genre that runs like a thread through every phase of the artist’s work is without a doubt the “American social landscape.” Friedlander used the expression in 1963 to describe the core of his oeuvre in Contemporary Photography, a magazine that ceased publication after a few issues. The term would stick with Friedlander, however, for the rest of his career; more so, it would describe the main focus of an entire generation of American photographers. Friedlander was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, 1962 and 1977. He had his ﬁrst solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963 and was a part of The Photographer’s Eye at the MoMA a year later. However, the most important exhibition of his early career was John Szarkowski’s landmark show New Documents in 1967. The exhibition proved a positive catalyst for Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander who became icons of contemporary photography over night. In the press release Szarkowski writes, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it. Their work betrays sympathy – almost affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value.”

underline a necessary truth of photography, more precisely un-manipulated photography: the presence of the photographer is inevitable. Different than painters or sculptures, the photographer lives what he captures. The picture is proof of what he saw and where he was. It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears — or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity. And because photographs look so much like seeing, this process threatens our possession of our own vision. It could be said that Lee Friedlander has made a lifelong job of trying to reverse this phenomenon. He marches straight into the heart of enemy territory, grabs photography by the throat, using its own weapons against it, and forces it to give us back the use of our eyes. Lee Friedlander has received recognition for his work since the beginning of his career. Critics and experts speak his name among those of distinguished masters of photography. His significance was reaffirmed in 2005 and 2008, when the Museums of Modern Art in New York City and San Francisco organized a retrospective of Friedlander’s photographs.

Friedlander plays with shadows, angles and obstacles which he uses to frame elements and structure his compositions. His own shadow or reﬂection can be found in countless pictures throughout the years. Friedlander clearly identiﬁes himself as a part of the American life he aims to capture. Furthermore, his self-portraits

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MIT, 1986 Sandra Fisher, 1975

LEE FRIEDLANDER

William S Borroughs, 1968

Garry Winogrand, Unknown Year

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Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1968

New York City, 1966

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Hospital, 2011

3 Refined Cover Designs

NOVEMBER 2017

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

COLD INTIMACY THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

MARIO SORRENTI

NOV ‘17

$4.99

PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAG’S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

COLD INTIMACY THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

MARIO SORRENTI

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAGâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

NOV 2017

3 Susan Sontag Design Directions

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SUSAN SONTAG

ON ON PHOTO PHOTO Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To To photograph photograph is is to to appropriate appropriate the the thing thing photographed. photographed. It It means means putting oneself into a certain putting oneself into a certain relation relation to to the the world world that that feels feels like like knowledge knowledge --- and, and, therefore, therefore, like like power. power. 10

A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

OGRAPHY An excerpt from “In Plato’s Cave”

imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression.

and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either,

Walker Evans’ Allie Mae Burroughs, 1935

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SUSAN ON PHOTOGRAPHY An excerpt from “In Plato’s Cave”

Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them,

of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire.

Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

SONTAG Alfred Stieglitz’s The Terminal, 1893 for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible

an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

LENS Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still

Art, and other classified treasures from around the

reproduced. Photographs, which package the world,

reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth.

globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal

seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums,

But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing,

magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that

framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops

there are a great many more images around, claiming

make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as

alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers

our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since

modern. Photographs really are experience captured,

compile them. • For many decades the book has been

then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing

and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood. • To photograph is to appropriate

the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing

eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our

the thing photographed. It means putting oneself

them longevity, if not immortality -- photographs are

world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs

into a certain relation to the world that feels like

fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid -- and a wider

alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are

knowledge -- and, therefore, like power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to

public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a

a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics

abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to

printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much

of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the

have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and

less of its essential quality when reproduced in a

photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads -- as an

psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form

book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of

anthology of images. • To collect photographs is to

of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental

photographs into general circulation. The sequence in

collect the world. Movies and television programs light

object, than photographic images, which now provide

which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed

up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to

most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written

by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of

produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In

about a person or an event is frankly an interpretation,

time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s

Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpenpeasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of

as are handmade visual statements, like paintings and drawings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are

film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books.

SUSA SONT

ON PHOTOGRAP 14

ON PHOTOGRAPHY Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph -- any photograph -- seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life. • While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no

AN TAG

PHY

An excerpt from “In Plato’s Cave”

generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience.

start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise

The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal

inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. • That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption -- the toy

pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light,

of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed -- seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had

dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating, promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity -- and ubiquity -- of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its

only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the self-consciousness of photography-as-art.

Colophon

LENS

was designed by Sullivan

All of the images and tex Typefaces Used:

are only being used for d

DIN BODONI UNIVERS GOTHAM

Printed at Jayhawk Ink in Lawrence, KS.

n Dyvad for Typographic Systems, 2017.

xt were sourced from publications and the interent and

design education purposes.

CONTENTS Lee Friedlander

The Master of Urban Photography

by Michèle Kieffer

On Photography

In Plato’s Cave (Excerpt)

Cold Intimacy

The Work of Mario Sorrenti

by Susan Sontag

by Sullivan Dyvad

Final Magazine

SPRING ‘17

VOL. 3

PHOTOGRAPHY MAGAZINE

ON PHOTOGRAPHY SUSAN SONTAG’S

FAMED 1977 ESSAY

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY LEE FRIEDLANDER

COLD INTIMACY THE WORK OF FASHION PHOTOGRAPHER

MARIO SORRENTI

LENS

was designed by Sullivan

All of the images and tex Typefaces Used:

are only being used for d

DIN BODONI UNIVERS GOTHAM

Printed at Jayhawk Ink in Lawrence, KS.

n Dyvad for Typographic Systems, 2017.

xt were sourced from publications and the interent and

design education purposes.

CONTENTS Lee Friedlander

The Master of Urban Photography

by Michèle Kieffer

On Photography

In Plato’s Cave (Excerpt)

Cold Intimacy

The Work of Mario Sorrenti

by Susan Sontag

by Sullivan Dyvad

LENS

LEE FRIEDLANDER

THE MASTER OF URBAN PHOTOGRAPHY STORY BY MICHÈLE KIEFFER A master of contemporary photography, Lee Friedlander is known for his exploration of the American social landscape. Friedlander combines his own psyche with the chaotic, ever-changing elements of the street to convey a true urban America. We take a closer look at the artist’s life and work. Lee Friedlander was born in the logging mill town of Aberdeen, Washington in 1934. He began photographing in 1948 because of a “fascination with the equipment,” in his words. His first paid job was a Christmas card photograph of a dog for a local madam named Peggy Plus. He later attended the Art Center School in Los Angeles to become a professional photographer, but left almost immediately. In 1956 he moved to New York and began freelancing. Because of his love of jazz he found work producing album covers. He sought magazine assignments and eventually met people in New York who would change his life: Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Louis Faurer, Helen Levitt, Richard Avedon, and, from a previous generation, Walker Evans. Friedlander and his new friends, along with innovative curators like John Szarkowski and Nathan Lyons, changed the course of American photography in the 1960s and 70s. He and Maria DiPaoli were married in 1958 and moved to a small town on the Hudson River where they live today. Landscapes, nudes, portraits and nature studies; Lee Friedlander has experimented with almost every subject

matter since he first began taking pictures. However, the genre that runs like a thread through every phase of the artist’s work is without a doubt the “American social landscape.” Friedlander used the expression in 1963 to describe the core of his oeuvre in Contemporary Photography, a magazine that ceased publication after a few issues. The term would stick with Friedlander, however, for the rest of his career; more so, it would describe the main focus of an entire generation of American photographers. Friedlander was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1960, 1962 and 1977. He had his first solo exhibition at the George Eastman House in 1963 and was a part of The Photographer’s Eye at the MoMA a year later. However, the most important exhibition of his early career was John Szarkowski’s landmark show New Documents in 1967. The exhibition proved a positive catalyst for Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander who became icons of contemporary photography over night. In the press release Szarkowski writes, “Their aim has been not to reform life but to know it. Their work betrays sympathy – almost affection – for the imperfections and the frailties of

society. They like the real world, in spite of its terrors, as the source of all wonder and fascination and value.” Friedlander plays with shadows, angles and obstacles which he uses to frame elements and structure his compositions. His own shadow or reflection can be found in countless pictures throughout the years. Friedlander clearly identifies himself as a part of the American life he aims to capture. Furthermore, his self-portraits underline a necessary truth of photography, more precisely un-manipulated photography: the presence of the photographer is inevitable. Different than painters or sculptures, the photographer lives what he captures. The picture is proof of what he saw and where he was. It has become increasingly difficult to see photographs as the visible world has been almost completely plastered over with lenticular representations of itself. Strangely, as the photograph becomes the world, it disappears — or perhaps more accurately, it loses its informative opacity. And because photographs look so much like seeing, this process threatens our possession of our own vision. It could be said that Lee Friedlander has made a lifelong job of trying to reverse this phenomenon. He marches straight into the heart of enemy territory, grabs photography by the throat, using its own weapons against it, and forces it to give us back the use of our eyes. Lee Friedlander has received recognition for his work since the beginning of his career. Critics and experts speak his name among those of distinguished masters of photography. His significance was reaffirmed in 2005 and 2008, when the Museums of Modern Art in New

LENS

MIT, 1986 Sandra Fisher, 1975

LEE FRIEDLANDER

William S Borroughs, 1968

Garry Winogrand, Unknown Year

LENS

Provincetown, Massachusetts, 1968

New York City, 1966

LEE FRIEDLANDER

Hospital, 2011

LENS

SUSAN SONTAG

ON PHOTOG Humankind lingers unregenerately in Plato’s cave, still reveling, its age-old habit, in mere images of the truth. But being educated by photographs is not like being educated by older, more artisanal images. For one thing, there are a great many more images around, claiming our attention. The inventory started in 1839 and since then just about everything has been photographed, or so it seems. This very insatiability of the photographing eye changes the terms of confinement in the cave, our world. In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe. They are a grammar and, even more importantly, an ethics of seeing. Finally, the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads – as an anthology of images. To collect photographs is to collect the world. Movies and television programs light up walls, flicker, and go out; but with still photographs the image is also an object, lightweight, cheap to produce, easy to carry about, accumulate, store. In Godard’s Les Carabiniers (1963), two sluggish lumpen-peasants are lured into joining the King’s Army by the promise that they will be able to loot, rape, kill, or do whatever else they please to the enemy, and get rich. But the suitcase of booty that Michel-Ange and Ulysse triumphantly bring home, years later, to their wives turns out to contain only picture postcards, hundreds of them, of Monuments, Department Stores, Mammals, Wonders of Nature, Methods of Transport, Works of Art, and other classified treasures from around the globe. Godard’s gag vividly parodies the equivocal magic of the photographic image., Photographs are perhaps the most mysterious of all the objects that make up, and thicken, the environment we recognize as modern. Photographs really are experience captured, and the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mood.

To To photograph photograph is is to to appropriate appropriate the thing photographed. the thing photographed. It It means means putting oneself into a certain putting oneself into a certain relation relation to to the the world world that that feels feels like like knowledge knowledge –– and, and, therefore, therefore, like like power. power. A now notorious first fall into alienation, habituating people to abstract the world into printed words, is supposed to have engendered that surplus of Faustian energy and psychic damage needed to build modern, inorganic societies. But print seems a less treacherous form of leaching out the world, of turning it into a mental object, than photographic images, which now provide most of the knowledge people have about the look of the past and the reach of the present. What is written about a person or an event is an interpretation, as are handmade visual statements, like paintings. Photographed images do not seem to be statements about the world so much as pieces of it, miniatures of reality that anyone can make or acquire. Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of the world, themselves get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold; they are reproduced. Photographs, which package the world, seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides. Newspapers and magazines feature them; cops alphabetize them; museums exhibit them; publishers compile them. For many decades the book has been the most influential way of arranging (and usually miniaturizing) photographs, thereby guaranteeing them longevity, if not immortality – photographs are fragile objects, easily torn or mislaid – and a wider public. The photograph in a book is, obviously, the image of an image. But since it is, to begin with, a printed, smooth object, a photograph loses much less of its essential quality when reproduced in a book than a painting does. Still, the book is not a

ON PHOTOGRAPHY

GRAPHY An excerpt from “In Plato’s Cave”

wholly satisfactory scheme for putting groups of photographs into general circulation. The sequence in which the photographs are to be looked at is proposed by the order of pages, but nothing holds readers to the recommended order or indicates the amount of time to be spent on each photograph. Chris Marker’s film, Si j’avais quatre dromadaires (1966), a brilliantly orchestrated meditation on photographs of all sorts and themes, suggests a subtler and more rigorous way of packaging (and enlarging) still photographs. Both the order and the exact time for looking at each photograph are imposed; and there is a gain in visual legibility and emotional impact. But photographs transcribed in a film cease to be collectable objects, as they still are when served up in books. Photographs furnish evidence. Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it. In one version of its utility, the camera record incriminates. Starting with their use by the Paris police in the murderous roundup of Communards in June 1871, photographs became a useful tool of modern states in the surveillance and control of their increasingly mobile populations. In another version of its utility, the camera record justifies. A photograph passes for incontrovertible proof that a given thing happened. The picture may distort; but there is always a presumption that something exists, or did exist, which is like what’s in the picture. Whatever the limitations (through amateurism) or pretensions (through artistry) of the individual photographer, a photograph – any photograph – seems to have a more innocent, and therefore more accurate, relation to visible reality than do other mimetic objects. Virtuosi of the noble image like Alfred Stieglitz and Paul Strand, composing mighty, unforgettable photographs decade after decade, still want, first of all, to show something “out there,” just like the Polaroid owner for whom photographs are a handy, fast form of

note-taking, or the shutterbug with a Brownie who takes snapshots as souvenirs of daily life.

While While aa painting painting or or aa prose prose description description can can never never be be other other than than aa narrowly narrowly selective selective interpretation, interpretation, aa photograph photograph can can be be treated treated as as aa narrowly narrowly selective selective transparency. transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film – the precise expression on the subject’s face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are. Those occasions when the taking of photographs is relatively undiscriminating,

promiscuous, or self-effacing do not lessen the didacticism of the whole enterprise. This very passivity – and ubiquity – of the photographic record is photography’s “message,” its aggression. Images which idealize (like most fashion and animal photography) are no less aggressive than work which makes a virtue of plainness (like class pictures, still lifes of the bleaker sort, and mug shots). There is an aggression implicit in every use of the camera. This is as evident in the 1840s and 1850s, photography’s glorious first two decades, as in all the succeeding decades, during which technology made possible an ever increasing spread of that mentality which looks at the world as a set of potential photographs. Even for such early masters as David Octavius Hill and Julia Margaret Cameron who used the camera as a means of getting painterly images, the point of taking photographs was a vast departure from the aims of painters. From its start, photography implied the capture of the largest possible number of subjects. Painting never had so imperial a scope. The subsequent industrialization of camera technology only carried out a promise inherent in photography from its very beginning: to democratize all experiences by translating them into images. That age when taking photographs required a cumbersome and expensive contraption – the toy of the clever, the wealthy, and the obsessed – seems remote indeed from the era of sleek pocket cameras that invite anyone to take pictures. The first cameras, made in France and England in the early 1840s, had only inventors and buffs to operate them. Since there were then no professional photographers, there could not be amateurs either, and taking photographs had no clear social use; it was a gratuitous, that is, an artistic activity, though with few pretensions to being an art. It was only with its industrialization that photography came into its own as art. As industrialization provided social uses for the operations of the photographer, so the reaction against these uses reinforced the selfconsciousness of photography-as-art.

LENS

most intensely creative time I’ve had,” he told Interview magazine. “I was shooting Polaroids all the time, I was creating diaries, I was painting, I was drawing. My work was my life, and my life was my work, and there was a kind of blur between reality and what was being created.” The powerful, unusual and often raw imagery perfectly encapsulates the photographer’s unique ability and aesthetic. If you don’t know who he is, you probably don’t care so much about fashion—which is fine, but maybe you should start caring because those pants look like shit. Just sayin’. So a small handful of you might not know Mario, but you’d know his work for sure. His most famous contribution would have to be the photo he took of Kate Moss for CK Obsession. You’ve seen it. It’s an incredible image. As much as we hate saying it was an industry ‘game-changer’, that’s precisely what it was, and it was by no means Mario’s last. For our fiftieth issue we managed to whisk the esteemed Mr Sorrenti away from his hectic work schedule to chat about his life and career.

COLD INTIMACY

BY SULLY DYVAD

LENS

I was hoping we could talk quickly about your background, for any of the kids who don’t know who you are. I know everyone knows who you are in fashion…

Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Where do you want to start? I think start from moving to New York—was that ’80 or ’81?

I moved to New York in 1980, yeah. And where was the first place you lived?

COLD INTIMACY

I have a boy and a girl.

So everyone besides your dad is a photographer. How does that work? Do you give each other criticism and stuff? Do you keep tabs on your sister’s photos? Or does your mum ring you up and go, ‘Hey, Mario, I saw those photos—they’re cool’?

We’re very close as a family. I love my sister’s photographs and I think she’s got an amazing sensibility; I think it’s totally different from mine. She helps me edit my pictures all the time, and she comments on my work often. I help her with her stuff, too. We share ideas and are helping each other out constantly. My mum used to take pictures; she doesn’t take pictures that much anymore. Actually, I don’t think she’s taken a picture in over ten years.

Who were your guys when you started shooting? Who did you look up to?

It’s funny—when I first started taking pictures I had no interest in doing fashion photography. I was going to school for fine art—studying painting and sculpture—and I was introduced to photography by a friend who was in school. The photographers I was introduced to, who I was just totally blown away by, were, like, Larry Clark and Mapplethorpe, Robert Frank and Sally Mann; those were the first books that I was interested in, the first photography that I was introduced to. And one of my friends was kind of a documentary photographer,

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so she would always show me documentary work and talk to me about the ethics of documentary photography, and then slowly, because my mum was in fashion and I was doing a little bit of modelling, I started looking at fashion photography in a totally different way. Because I was well aware of fashion photography but I’d never had any interest in it until I started picking up the camera, and then slowly I was like, ‘Oh wow, I like Bruce Weber’s pictures and I like what Steven Meisel is doing.’ Slowly I started paying attention to fashion photography and those guys and what they were doing, and I thought it was pretty remarkable. I started taking pictures

Yeah, I was very young. I might have actually been twenty years old, I think. That’s crazy.

Yeah. Then I started looking at Avedon and Irving Penn. I loved Irving Penn, I thought Irving Penn was my fashion hero—he still is,

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in a way; I still have an incredible passion for Penn’s images. I actually had done some modelling for Bruce Weber, so I ended up meeting him and he was such an incredible individual, and very inspiring and very sweet and also very supportive. I would show him my photographs and he would be very kind and supportive and egg me on to do more and push me and say, ‘Do more pictures of your friends, they’re great, keep going,’ and that was… He was a very special person. So you started really young, and the [Calvin Klein] Obsession shoot you did with Kate in ’93—you were only twenty-four years old. And that was like your big break, right?

Then I got a contract for Harper’s Bazaar, for editorial work, I was doing Dolce & Gabbana, and then the Obsession thing happened. It was early on, though, yeah. I was twenty-two, twenty-three years old. Were you worried because you reached such success at such a young age? Were you ever like, ‘When’s the wave going to crash?’

No. When you’re young like that and you’re just going for it—I had so much energy and I was like… Invincible?

I would probably give the same best advice that I got when I was young. I remember

I went to meet David Bradshaw, who was the fashion editor of Arena magazine, and I was twenty years old and he called me in to show him my work and I didn’t even have a portfolio at the time, so I just went in and showed him my pictures and he’s like, ‘So what do you want to do?’ And I was like, ‘I don’t really know, I just want to take pictures.’ And he said, ‘Well, when you have an idea and you figure it out, you can come back.’ From that day on I realised if you’re going to go and see somebody, or meet somebody at a magazine or for some advertising campaign or something, you should always go with an idea. Don’t ever go unprepared, anywhere. Always be ready.

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Thank you!