Global quirkiness

I remember the first issue of Colors back in 1991, certainly a different looking magazine, big photos (and frequently over enlarged) exuberant page design and articles that had a unique perspective on life around the world.  It was funded though by the deep pockets of clothing manufacturer Benetton which allowed writer Oliviero Toscani and designer Tibor Kalman to do their own thing without the constraints that other publication live with.

This large size book is a celebration of ninety issues of the magazine but I found the contents as scattershot as some copies of the magazine I had seen.  The pages are a collection of reproductions of spreads from past issues which means that some of the text isn't readable or some of the copy has been reset and used with pictures from the original articles.  There are ten themed chapters (plus two interviews at the start of the book with Toscani and Luciano Benetton) but they are very loosely based on their subject.  The one called Elvis meanders around all sorts of items with very little to do with a dead rock 'n roll star.  The one that seems the most obvious is Bang, which looks at various types of guns and explosives from around the globe.

This could have been a worthwhile look back at ninety issues if only the Editors has presented the material in a more thoughtful way that would make sense to the reader.  I always thought the Colors covers were interesting but there isn't even a spread or two showing all of them since 1991, the nearest you'll get to that is photo on page seventeen showing all of them in one pile with the spines facing the camera.

Handsome posters

The twenty-six poster books in the series

The Hand is the latest poster publication from the Zurich based Mueum fur Gestaltung.  The 113 in the book (all in color) feature this vital part of the human body in all sorts of combinations.  Similar themed posters are featured together, for example, writing a message on a hand has five on a spread, an adult holding a babies hand features four on a spread, the hand as a fist has five but oddly Lord Kitchener's famous and much copied 1914 Britain wants you army recruitment poster isn't included on the spread with five pointing finger versions.

The graphic interpretation of the hand by designers is quite comphensive: hand prints; holding hands; x-ray hands; pensioner hands; claw like hands; hands holding pencils, knives, bottles, phones; cigarettes et cetera.  The posters throughout the book are mostly European and date from 1919 to 2010, each has a brief caption with a numerical listing in the back pages giving more technical details.

This is the twenty-seventh book in the poster series and nicely they are all the same size and format.  Practising designers and students will be stimulated by the creative work in these pages.

Art of the commercial lens

Retail Fictions was published in conjunction with an exhibition of Bartholomew's work at the LA County Museum of Art in 1998. He was one of those interesting commercial photographers equally at home in the studio or working out doors. Starting in mid-thirties with a New York studio he created advertising work for major corporations like General Electric, Texaco, Eastman Kodak and Coca-Cola but also editorial shots for Harper's Bazaar, Ladies Home Journal, McCall's and Redbook.

There are thirty-two photos in the book for Eastman Kodak from 1946 to 1952 (eight of these are in a two page fold-out) the company was one of his major clients because he had a knack of capturing groups of adolescence using a Kodak camera. Another of his specialities was using a stroboscopic lighting for multiple-exposure photos, there several of these for Playtex and a beautiful color one, over a spread, for Texaco.

The book is well produced with 108 plates, all of which involve people, I'm surprised there weren't a few still-life shots included. Tim Wride writes an interesting twenty-page essay (with illustrations) at the front of the book about Bartholomew's life and his work as a commercial photographer. What I liked about the book was seeing advertising photos without all the headlines and copy that art directors put on photos without too much consideration regarding the image. As all work is from the mid-thirties to the fifties it's a nostalgic look back to see how products were sold with photos.

Phoebe in troubleland 5/5

I first saw some of these strips in the Evergreen Review in the sixties. I had no idea they were reprinted until I came across this paperback while browsing in a second-hand bookshop sometime in the mid-eighties and discovered that there were additional adventures by O'Donoghue and Springer included, no doubt to bulk out the book. Phoebe seems to be sought out by a bunch of the world's ne'er-do-wells who inflict on her plenty of cruel and unusual punishments but luckily our heroine manages to escape each time, ready for a new adventure.

O'Donoghue's writing is just right with plenty of sixties cultural references. Episode ten Pain and ink, starts with the following:

MACAO Sprawling city of 2 million! Fleshpot of the enigmatic East!
MACAO Where every narrow, twisting alley leads to an unmarked grave and a man's shadow is seldom his own!
MACAO Where pestilence, famine and carnage are not disasters but a way of life!
MACAO Where a woman costs less than a cigarette and there is no word for virtue!

These statements are illustrated with four panels with Frank Springer's brilliant artwork. It's his artwork that I enjoy most about the book, he's a master at packing panels with detail and getting the most out of O'Donoghue's story line.

The prices for the title seem excessive to me so I think it's worth searching the net for a reasonably priced copy.