August 5, 2025 • 44 mins
Between the World Wars, ideas about meaning, truth, and the ethics of persuasion informed newly articulated principles for combining word and image. The young field of graphic design developed quickly during this period, and photography played a central role as a visual language of modern life. The concept Typophoto was coined by Bauhaus artist László Moholy-Nagy and played a foundational role in the modernist graphic design movement known as the New Typography. Here, Jessica D. Brier, author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, joins Ellen Lupton in conversation about this fascinating period in design history.
Jessica D. Brier is curator of photography at the Frances Lehman Loeb Art Center at Vassar College. She is author of Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography, editor of On the Grid: Ways of Seeing in Print and coeditor of Making a Life in Photography: Rollie McKenna.
Ellen Lupton is a graphic designer, writer, and curator who has authored many books about design, including Thinking with Type and Extra Bold, and teaches design theory at Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore.
REFERENCES:
Painting, Photography, Film / László Moholy-Nagy
Jan Tschichold
Walter Benjamin
El Lissitzky
Never Use Futura / Douglas Thomas
Paul Renner
Meisterschule für Deutschlands Buchdrucker
Bauhaus
Praise for the book:
“A novel interplay between text and image, Typophoto fused—as Jessica D. Brier demonstrates in this insightful account—the interests of advertisers with those of the avant-garde, thus instigating a process that ultimately resulted in the ubiquitous pixelated imagery of our own day.
—Kathleen James-Chakraborty, author of Modernism as Memory
“Deeply researched . . . highlights the ways new print technologies enabled photography to become the central medium of modernist visual culture. “
—Paul Stirton, author of Jan Tschichold and the New Typography
Typophoto: New Typography and the Reinvention of Photography by Jessica D. Brier is available from University of Minnesota Press. Thank you for listening.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Jess Brier (00:02):
So
Ellen Lupton (00:05):
many aspects of mass communication are designed
to disappear.
Jess Brier (00:13):
Art and design has its own life once it goes into
the world, and that tension orthat gap is really a fascinating
one.
Ellen Lupton (00:24):
Hi, Jess. How are you doing? Tell us what you're
up to.
Jess Brier (00:29):
Hello, my name is Jess Brier. I'm glad to be here
with you Ellen. I am the curatorof photography at the Francis
Lehman Loeb Art Center at BassarCollege up in the Hudson Valley
in New York And I am now theauthor of New Typography and the
Reinvention of Photography. SoI'm really excited to talk about
(00:51):
the book with you.
Ellen Lupton (00:52):
I love your book. I'm Ellen Lupton, and I'm a
graphic designer, writer,curator. I teach design history,
and I'm fascinated by thisperiod in history. And I think a
lot of historians, arthistorians and designers will be
familiar with the termphotomontage. But your book is
(01:13):
about something different,typophoto,
Jess Brier (01:17):
which was a term used in the 20s by avant garde
designers, but it kind of didn'tstick around. So can you tell us
what typophoto is? Sure. Sotypophoto was a word invented by
Laszlo Moholy Nagy, who was areally fascinating artist and
designer and teacher at theBauhaus. And while he was at the
(01:39):
Bauhaus, he wrote a book calledPainting Photography Film in
1925 and it's actually one ofthe most important texts on
photography written in the1920s.
He was an incredibly prolificwriter and theorist and in that
book he introduced the termtypophoto or typophoto in
German. It's great to have abook title that's a made up
(02:01):
German word. Basically hisexplanation of that was pretty
simple. It was the synthesis oftypography and photography And
he actually predictedinterestingly that images would
replace text ultimately as aform of communication. He really
believed in newer media.
Photography was still relativelynew at the time and the mass
(02:24):
circulation of photography wasmuch more new. He predicted that
eventually we would stop usingtype and text and we would use
images as forms ofcommunication, primary forms of
communication. So I often thinkof this when I use an emoji or
something. You know, I thinkhe'd be really fascinated by the
world that we live in now. Hewas a real believer in new
(02:47):
media.
You know, even though he wastalking about how text would
eventually be obsolete, the termwas picked up by graphic
designers. Jan Schuykold, who'san important figure in this
book, he was a really prolificgraphic designer of the period
who you know well, Ellen. Hepicked up this term and adopted
it as a principle of what hecalled the new typography. So
(03:10):
this new movement of avant gardedesign and he wrote a kind of
manifesto on the new typographythat same year 1925 and one of
its core principles was thatphotography should be used as a
means of illustration. So hekind of assimilated Mahalin
Naj's idea and turned it into aprinciple for graphic design.
(03:32):
So that's really the meat of thebook.
Ellen Lupton (03:34):
Yeah. And he got the word new typography from
Maholy Nagy too, right? So JanCicchold visited the Bauhaus in
1923, and he picked up thisamazing book, the catalog of the
big Bauhaus exhibition designedby Moholy Nagy that featured a
manifesto of typography calledThe New Typography. So it's such
(03:58):
a great story. So you make anargument that photography as a
discourse and a practice wasfundamentally changed by
photomechanical reproduction.
And what is the core technologyof that transformation?
Jess Brier (04:18):
So the technology that transformed photography for
graphic design and for printingwas a halftone process. So this
was actually a process that wasinvented in the 1880s. It
essentially allowed the massprinting of photography on the
same plate as type which reallywas a kind of game changer for
(04:40):
being able to mass reproducephotographs and photographs
would be re photographed througha screen, the halftone screen.
So halftone really refers towhat happens to break up the
tones of the photograph and turnthem into tiny dots. Every
photograph as you know that'sprinted with offset printing in
(05:04):
books and magazines in anyprinted ephemera those are half
tones and I find themfascinating because in order to
see them properly there is anoptical illusion that happens.
So we're actually able to notlook at the dots, but just look
at the image. So halftone refersboth to the process and to the
image, a halftone photograph,for example.
Ellen Lupton (05:27):
And yet we don't notice it. And so many aspects
of mass communication aredesigned to disappear. Right? So
when we read a book, we're notthinking about the fonts. When
we look at a photograph, weimagine the diva on the beach,
not a photographer taking apicture that then gets processed
(05:50):
and retouched in all theseartificial means.
We are delivered the appearanceof reality, right? Or what
Walter Benjamin, the Orchid inthe Land of Technology, right?
It's so beautiful. And yet somany people aren't aware that
the halftone had such an impacton the world and is still so
(06:15):
active today.
Jess Brier (06:17):
And of course, we live in the world of digital
pixels now, right? So thehalftone also preceded the
atomization of images onscreens, right, that we look at
every day. And I think that thatidea of something designed to
disappear, as you're saying,Ellen, this is exactly what I'm
fascinated by both the halftoneand graphic design in general,
(06:39):
right? These things that are notmeant to be looked at
critically, I think are exactlythe things that we should be
looking at critically. And so Iwas really excited to kind of
bring an art historian's eye tothese things that are, as you
say, meant to disappear.
Ellen Lupton (06:55):
And the halftone technology, so it was introduced
in the 1880s. It's older thanthe artist that you're writing
about. So it was new, but notreally new. Right? It's sort of
like my kids growing up with theinternet.
So what did these avant gardeartists they come of age in a
(07:15):
world that's already litteredwith halftone photography. Mass
media is already there, right?It's the water. It's the air.
What did they do to make itdifferent and to create this
revolution in visualcommunication?
Jess Brier (07:37):
So the halftone had existed for a while but it was
still not great. We often thinkabout, I think we have this myth
that photography immediatelyreplaced, you know, sketch
reporting in newspapers andactually that was kind of a
longer process. People wouldcomplain when they saw half
tones in the newspaper at firstthat they were too screeny,
(08:00):
quote
Ellen Lupton (08:01):
unquote. Because they could see the texture,
right?
Jess Brier (08:05):
Yeah, yeah, it was it was really distracting and of
course they were used to sketchreporting that was considered,
you know, a reliable source ofvisual information. So it took a
little while and then offsetprinting really changed the game
for mass communication andoffset printing is something
that these designers were veryadept at using and designing for
(08:27):
offset printing. So this wasreally a much more sophisticated
kind of printing. This is howbooks are still printed today
And with offset printing theywere able to experiment a little
bit more with the form of thehalftone. So the aesthetic
experimentation that they didwith the halftone was you know,
(08:50):
once it had been perfected,people couldn't see those dots
anymore.
Then they thought, well, whydon't we blow it up again and
make it, you know, 10 dpi. Andthey started to really play with
the form of the halftone itself.And it became a form that
communicated ideas abouttechnology, about printing. They
were really showing off whatthey could do with offset
(09:12):
printing.
Ellen Lupton (09:13):
And sort of exposing the medium.
Jess Brier (09:16):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And celebrating
technology, which is why theywere so excited about
photography, right? This wasabout what the machine could do,
right? What they could do ascraftsmen working with the
machine.
So that was both the printingmachines and also the machine of
the camera.
Ellen Lupton (09:36):
And so, Mahal Naj in that essay, he talks about
photography as objective. Heuses this beautiful phrase, the
hygiene of the optical. And sothis is a belief and an ideology
about the truth value ofphotography. And that kind of
shifted over the course of the20s had really disappeared by
(10:00):
the 30s. You talk about thisconflict between the objective
and the subjective, thepropaganda and manipulation and
psychology?
Jess Brier (10:11):
Absolutely, yeah. So as you say initially there is
this belief in photography astruthful and and objective and
this is really what Moholyembraces And over time, well he
writes about typophoto in hismanifesto, The New Typography,
(10:33):
as I mentioned, and that isreally kind of telegraphing this
idea of photography as exact andobjective. But then the way that
these principles of newtypography are used is for
advertising. So the kind of mainvehicle for this new kind of
(10:57):
design is meant for persuadingconsumers to buy things. These
designers are making design forthe purposes of consumer
propaganda.
The way that they actually usephotography is really not very
objective. They are more andmore embracing photo montage
(11:17):
literally cutting and pastingpieces of photographs
reconfiguring them on the page,using retouching to manipulate
those fragments of photographsto make advertising that looks
very different from advertisingtoday but it's familiar in the
sense that it's veryassociative. It's meant to evoke
(11:38):
emotions and abstract ideas, notso much pure objective facts,
right? That's not really theeffectiveness of advertising.
Advertising is effective becauseit makes us feel things and it
makes us remember things thatare strange and interesting,
right?
I speak to students aboutadvertising and the ads that
(12:01):
they remember are, you know, thegeico gecko, which has nothing
to do with insurance, right? Butit's, it's a funny animal that
talks, right? These are thetropes of advertising, things
that catch our attention, thatseem strange and kind of surreal
and absurd, right? So that issomething that I find really
(12:21):
fascinating with these designsthat they're talking about
objectivity and yet they'remaking designs that are kind of
surreal and bizarre and anythingbut objective and they're really
using photography to do that.
Ellen Lupton (12:38):
So, Moholy Naj wrote about how type could
become photographic. So thehalftone process was literally
about turning photos into typethat could be printed
letterpress or offset. Butinitially letterpress at the
(12:59):
same height as metal type. Thiswas revolutionary because before
1880s you couldn't put aphotograph and type together. So
the halftone literally turnedphotographs into typography,
into a typographic block, aprocess block.
(13:19):
But Moholy Nagy also wrote abouthow typography could become
photographic. And there are somebeautiful this is more
experimental and certainly notpart of mainstream advertising.
It's more of a thoughtexperiment and a technology
experiment. And there's somebeautiful examples of this in
(13:41):
your book. Can you try to bringto life in our listeners' minds
what some of these type as photoexperiments look like?
Jess Brier (13:52):
Yeah, so more and more they were experimenting
with photography in lots ofdifferent ways. So I mentioned
photo montage. Another kind ofexperiment was with what are
called photograms, so cameraless photographs that are made
by placing objects onphotosensitive paper, exposing
(14:14):
them to light, and they would dothis sometimes with stencils. So
some of these designersincluding Moholy Nagy, the
Russian designer El Lizitsky whowas prolific in this period and
Jan Chikholt all made designssome of which were printed most
of which were just kind ofexperiments that they did in
(14:35):
their their studios that I foundin archives. But these were were
photograms that were reallymostly typographic but they were
made through through thisphotographic process.
And then there are some otherlots of other examples of
actually using layeringhalftones on one another in ways
(14:59):
that kind of play up the waythat light passes through
objects in a sort ofphotographic way. So really
using the language ofprintmaking to then evoke the
idea of photography of kind oflight and shadow playing and
then a lot of kind ofexperiments with creating
(15:23):
designs where there's a kind ofreversal of positive and
negative so using white andblack contrast and really
evoking the again the idea ofphotography not necessarily the
medium of photography but usingtypographic forms and processes
to do that. So I kind ofdiscovered this whole world of
(15:48):
typo photo beyond beyond simplyputting type and photographs
together, right? This otherlayer of meaning behind
typophoto, as Mahalin Naj wroteabout.
Ellen Lupton (16:02):
Right. And the overprinting of type onto
pictures was definitely anemerging language mass media
that wouldn't have been typicalin a newspaper in the 1890s, for
example. There's a particularfont from the 20s that was
(16:22):
marketed to designers andprinters as the ultimate
typeface of photo montage. Thiswas the only font you should use
if you were serious about photomontage. Tell us about that font
and who created it.
Jess Brier (16:38):
So the font is Futura. It was the predecessor
of all of the sans seriftypefaces that we see today,
including Helvetica, which isprobably familiar to most of our
listeners. This is a verycommonly used font especially
for commercial design. Futurawas invented by Paul Renner in
(16:59):
1927. As you say it was marketedas the perfect companion to
photo montage and photomontagethe perfect companion to Futura.
And of course the name sayseverything about the intention
of this font. Sans serif typelike photography was thought of
as a modern type by thesegraphic designers. Sans Serif
(17:22):
indicated futurity, futura,modernization, utopia, a kind of
new future that they wereinterested in creating.
Ellen Lupton (17:32):
And Futura is more than just sans serif. It also
has this very strong geometricidentity. Like the O's are
perfect circles or seeminglyperfect and the M's are
triangular. This made it verydifferent from the so called
anonymous grotesques that werethe alternative to Futura that
(17:54):
had already existed. You couldfind in a normal print shop
these sort of sturdy workhousegrotesque sans serifs.
But Renner wanted to create atruly modern sans serif. And
Futura today remains one of themost popular typefaces in the
world. And in fact, many of ourlisteners, if you look at your
(18:17):
font menu, there will be aversion of Futura in your list
of loaded typefaces on yourcomputer. So if you want to be
modern, try Futura. Helvetica isa bit more speaking back to that
anonymous sans, and Futuraembraces the geometric ideology
(18:42):
of the Bauhaus and functionalismat its height and is still just
so popular.
And in fact, when NASA landed onthe moon, the sign that they put
there is printed in Futura.
Jess Brier (18:57):
I didn't know that. That's fascinating.
Ellen Lupton (19:00):
The future. Yeah. One of my students wrote an
incredible book called Never UseFutura because it's sort of a
truism in art school to avoidusing this font because it's
overused. And anyway, he didthis beautiful history of Futura
that I highly recommend to allof you. Great.
Never use Futura. And Renneractually founded his own art
(19:24):
school or taught in an artschool that was quite different
from the Bauhaus. So tell usabout that art school.
Jess Brier (19:32):
Yeah, so in 1927 Paul Renner was living in Munich
which was not a cityparticularly associated with
modernism or avant garde art anddesign but there were some
really interesting people livingthere and who moved there
because of the founding of thisschool. So Paul Renner founded
(19:54):
the Meisterschule furDeutschland's Buchtruke which
was there's not a greattranslation for Meisterschule
but master school is about theclosest we have in English. So
the school for German bookprinters. So the school is
actually founded to train futureproprietors of printing houses.
(20:16):
So they were learning about newprint technology but also
scientific business managementwhich was a fairly new field and
also of course the traditions oftypography, schwift form, letter
form, a design which has a longand very proud history in
(20:40):
Germany.
So it was really this marriageof kind of deep German
traditions of typography withthis very modern education in
printing and in business. PaulRenner taught there and
eventually Jan Chichold taughtthere as well. So this is how I
learned about the MeisterSchule. This is not a very well
(21:01):
known school, unlike the Bauhausbut one of Chichol's archives
holds a number of papers andstudent designs and faculty
designs from that program and Ireally became fascinated by it
because this is where a lot ofhalftone experimentation was
taking place.
Ellen Lupton (21:21):
It is an incredible student work in your
book. Tell us about that. Helpus see it.
Jess Brier (21:29):
Yeah, so I'm going to look at these images while I
talk about them because they'rereally great examples of what
we've been talking about, youknow, print offset printing
especially and and letterpressto show off what design can do
and what printing techniques cando. So overlapping montaged half
(21:55):
tones blowing them up showingthe dot pattern overlapping
different colors so of courseonly one color could be printed
at a time so we have there'sthis great design by an unknown
designer that features thesefragmented half tones. They're
(22:15):
flowers. One is printed blue,yellow, and red. And then of
course they make green and akind of purple as as they
overlap one another and it'sit's really just this kind of it
creates this kind of abstractbouquet of color and type and
(22:35):
and flowers and it's really justshowing off you know what they
can do with with print withcolor and with the halftone.
So other sort of experiments youknow around making making type
more photographic, makingphotographs more typographic. I
(22:56):
mean this was really a richterritory for experimenting and
of course these are studentassignments so what better place
to do that experimentationright? These are not commissions
for a job these are not forclients so I think some of the
richest experimentation actuallyhappened in this setting, in
(23:16):
this educational setting, whichis a real testament to the
pedagogy.
Ellen Lupton (23:22):
Yeah, and that piece is really a demonstration
of the printing process, thusexposing the process, which is
also intriguing in relation topsychological theory at the
time. And you have a wholechapter about the psychology of
perception. And it has alwaysfascinated me that the kind of
(23:43):
scientific diagrams used todemonstrate perception then
became a model for what a goodlogo should look like, you know,
or what an icon for a bathroomsign, you know, all those things
feed on the language of thescientific diagram, the
(24:03):
demonstration. So tell us aboutperceptual research.
Jess Brier (24:09):
Sure. So one of the rabbit holes I had to go down
for this project was tounderstand what these designers
meant when they talked aboutlegibility. So they were very
insistent about the legibilityof sans serif type and also of
(24:29):
about the legibility ofphotography. So I thought I had
a sense of what that meant. Iknew of course some of the
associations they were makingwith photography but what does
legibility mean?
What does it mean for somethingto be more readable? And where
this led me was to to look atapplied psychology research.
(24:51):
This was a huge field in theearly part of the twentieth
century And it was a veryexperimental field. So graphic
design is also a new field inthe 20s. It's really just kind
of finding its footing.
And so to lend credibility tothis new field, they're looking
to science to say, this is whatresearch says about what is
(25:14):
legible. Now what's interestingabout applied psychology is that
it is largely funded by theadvertising industry. And so
what legibility means isefficiency, speed, right? The
kind of reading that we wantpeople to do when they read
advertisements is fast, right?They are flipping through a
newspaper or a magazine orlooking at a billboard.
(25:37):
These are the forms ofadvertising in the 1920s. We
need to make things readablevery quickly and then we need
things to be memorable. And sothey created lab experiments to
try to replicate the conditionsof reading but of course in a
very artificial way. No one ishooked up to an eye tracking
(26:01):
machine when they're reading amagazine for example so they
would create these kinds ofapparatuses which by the way
relied on photographictechnology to do things like eye
tracking. To learn about how theeye moves around an image to
think about the legibility ofimages and they devised all
(26:26):
kinds of these experiments andthey as you say they're often
using abstract images that thenbecome the kind of prototype for
logos later on.
So it's really feeding rightinto the advertising industry
both in its funding and in itsapplication, right, it's applied
(26:48):
psychology. This is what theymean by legible. They mean
efficient. The new typographersalso use the word economic,
which is not an accident, right?Very much the language of
capitalism is behind this.
And you know you can imagineanother kind of legibility. Know
when you read a novel, forexample, you might choose to
(27:08):
read slowly because it's areally enjoyable experience. And
I find these ads to also bethings that I want to linger on.
They are interesting to look atfor a long time. They're not
meant to be looked at closely,but there is another kind of
experience that comes out oflooking at them very closely.
(27:29):
So the legibility they wereafter was something quite
specific. And these experimentsended up becoming as I said kind
of the backing for those ideasof graphic designers and they
circulated through more kind ofpopular psychology texts that
then were picked up and quotedin trade journals for
(27:50):
typographers, for printers, forgraphic designers.
Ellen Lupton (27:53):
And were there principles that were really
useful? Like I think I've read alot of legibility studies
related to type, which basicallyeveryone wants to prove that
sans serif type is more or lesslegible, and all of this stuff
has basically failed. Were thereprinciples related to the
legibility of photography thatare really legitimate or useful?
Jess Brier (28:19):
Well, not really. Where photography was very
useful to applied psychology wasas a metaphor for what happens
in in perception. So photographyat this time especially in the
20s and 30s was often talkedabout as a surrogate for the
(28:43):
human eye, A kind of Uberversion of the human eye,
something that could faithfullyrecord what it sees and imprint
itself, right? That's literallywhat happens when you make a
photograph. And that's how theyunderstood memory to work, that
you would see something and ifit was memorable enough, it
(29:04):
would imprint itself on themind.
They were speakingmetaphorically about the
workings of memory and usingphotography as a way to
visualize that and materializethat. They were actually
understanding images to beimprinted on the mind as though
it's a piece of paper, right? Asthough it's a substrate that you
(29:25):
could print on. They talkedabout memory value and it's
again no coincidence that theword value is being used. They
would talk about attentionvalue, memory value, things that
were quantifiable and thereforewere able to be monetized
ultimately.
So photography was very usefulto them both as a technology for
(29:48):
studying reading and perceptionand also as a metaphor for
helping them to communicate whatthe results of these studies
were. And then of course, theywere also using halftone
printing to reproduce the imagesthat they were using as
scientific evidence, right, aspieces of evidence for this
research.
Ellen Lupton (30:06):
So you talk about this oscillation between reading
and seeing that is part of howwe perceive photography. Of
course, it's essential toreading itself, to type, that we
are reading the words andtherefore forgetting the
phonetic system and certainlythe font. But then we flip back
(30:27):
and forth between this abilityto see the form on the page or
on the screen and the seemingtransparency of absorbing the
language in the case oftypography. Tell me how that
works with photography, theseeing versus reading, this
oscillation. It seems likethat's one of your arguments in
(30:49):
the book.
Jess Brier (30:50):
Yes, this is something that these designers
are doing with both type andphotography is really playing
with, you know, the fact thatobviously all letter forms are
also visual images, right? Theyare put together to make text
and we understand how to readthem as such because we learn
(31:11):
how to read. But we also readimages and they were very aware
of that and again this kind ofassociation of photography with
truth with the idea thatphotography is a form of
information, visual information,this really lends itself to this
idea that we also read images.And it's interesting because
(31:33):
reading images meansinterpreting images and you
wouldn't think that they wouldreally want to leave a lot of
room for interpretation. Again,we're talking about advertising,
we're talking about commercialdesign that's meant to be
glanced at and then rememberedlater.
But there is a kind of laborinvolved and this is what I find
(31:55):
really interesting about all ofthese experiments is it really
highlights how much work thereader has to do as a reader, as
a viewer, right? The oscillationas you're describing between
seeing and reading,understanding how an image
relates to a text, is oneexplaining the other, are they
(32:15):
in conflict? Often inadvertising the text and the
image don't actually seem likethey have a lot to do with one
another and so you have to dothe work of connecting those
dots. Advertising plays onassociation. We are remembering
things but again that logodoesn't necessarily illustrate a
(32:36):
fact about what is beingadvertised.
It is illustrating somethingmemorable that hopefully you
will learn to associate with thefeeling that you might get if
you buy this product, right?There's a there's a lot of work
that actually goes into readingadvertising and reading any
graphic design, think. And so,know, with photography, they
(32:58):
know that photographs have allof these associations. Again
with with modern technology,with the future, progress, all
of this is very conditioned bykind of this moment between the
wars that these are being madeand they're playing on those
(33:19):
associations and relying on thereader really as a kind of co
creator of those designs bydoing that labor of seeing,
reading, knowing when to dowhich thing and putting it all
together in their mind.
Ellen Lupton (33:33):
Yeah, and I think it's also an oscillation between
our accepting the truth of thescene in a photograph versus the
fact that it's ink on paper,that it's a surface, that it's
artifice. And so you talk a lotin the book about this myth of
objectivity and technologicalpurity, right? Hands off, right?
(33:58):
The mechanical eye. And then theincredible amount of handwork
involved in actually making aphotograph ready for print.
And we still do this today withPhotoshop. Tell us about that
handwork in this world of thephotographic object.
Jess Brier (34:22):
Sure. So the term that we use, the sort of
umbrella term we use isretouching to make photographs
ready for print.
Ellen Lupton (34:30):
I love the tactility of that retouching.
It's amazing. It's abouttouching. And there's so many
images of the hand in modernism.Like that could be a whole book,
you know, the hand, the hand,the hand.
And yet we obsess over themechanical eye and the removal
of the hand. But this realm ofretouching, which was often done
(34:55):
by, printing technologists,technicians, lower paid people,
women. That, you know, what wasinvolved in that retouching?
Jess Brier (35:09):
Yeah, I mean, even the word makes it sound like a
tiny intervention and of courseit's a complete transformation.
So this was one of my owndefinitions of typophoto was
that retouching is another formof truly blending typography and
photography because when aphotograph is prepared for
(35:30):
printing and I'll speak about1925 not today it's a different
process obviously and that's notmy wheelhouse but one hundred
years ago that process washighly tactile as you're
describing Ellen and retouchingwas really an umbrella term that
encompassed a lot of differenttechniques including carving
(35:52):
into negatives. So before aphotograph was even printed
manipulating negatives obviouslyphoto montage is part of the
process of retouching. There'ssomething called silhouetting
where a fragment is sort of cutout of a photograph right we
only want the product that'sbeing sold and then around the
(36:14):
edges there's this kind of softfading away and there's no
background because of course youwant a kind of white background
or a color or something todecontextualize that object and
help us focus on that object.Then you know halftones were for
(36:35):
a lot of advertisers wereconsidered kind of drab for all
of their excitement aboutphotography.
They didn't really like the waythat photography looked. And so
retouching included, you know,drawing and painting on to
halftones and airbrushing. So anactual airbrush, right, which
(36:56):
precedes the digital version ofairbrushing. All of these layers
of very tedious handwork andcraft really that made
photographs into these kind ofshiny perfect crisp images that
(37:17):
everything was perfectlyoutlined and there's some nice
illustrations in the book ofsort of comparing the so called
bare halftone which was just youknow gray and unexciting
unappealing according toadvertisers and it needed to be
punched up for print through allof these processes of
(37:39):
retouching. And so what you getin the end is are these images
that technically are photographsbut they look so uncanny.
Think especially to us right welook at ads that include
photography from this period andI mean I just find them
(38:01):
completely fascinating becauseit looks nothing like any kind
of other photography you knowbecause of this layering process
and because of this truetransformation that happens to
prepare them to be printed.
Ellen Lupton (38:15):
Yeah, the tools today are really not that
different. They're just digitaland they still require a high
degree of manual skill in orderto smooth out the edges and
silhouette objects. AI is makingit easier, but that's happening
fast. So in a way, book is aboutpedagogy. Do you want to say
(38:40):
anything about the teaching ofdesign?
Jess Brier (38:44):
Sure. I mean, the well, the Bauhaus obviously is
our touchstone for thinkingabout how art and design
pedagogy changed in this period.Ellen, you mentioned the kind of
pure what Chicole would call thepure forms of Futura, right? The
perfect circle is the O and thetriangles that made the M or the
N. These are ideas that werereally coming through in
(39:06):
pedagogy of the period.
This was a time when, as I said,graphic design was a new field
and so it was really born in anew version of the art school
where artists and designersfirst of all were trained
together. So the Meister Schuleis a little bit of a different
example, but in the Bauhaus, youknow, weavers, painters,
(39:27):
architects, graphic designers,everyone was trained in things
like color theory, trained touse forms, to experiment with
forms through differentmaterials, and then they would
go on to specialize in differentareas. So there was an idea that
art and design were intimatelyrelated. This came through
really strongly in pedagogy anda lot of these artists really
(39:51):
believed in art and design asclosely related. I often find it
bizarre that we study arthistory and design history so
separately, which is one of thereasons I wanted to write this
book that I think these thingsneed to be studied and written
about together because that'sexactly how the people making
these things, know, the artistsand designers were thinking
(40:13):
about it.
But the way that those ideaswere taught had a huge impact on
these experimental designs. Andthen after World War II,
obviously many of thesedesigners fled Germany. We're
talking about design mostly inGermany. And many of these
designers had to flee to eitherother parts of Western Europe or
(40:35):
to The United States and theirideas went with them. So design
pedagogy after the war and Iwould say up to the present day
Ellen you can tell me if I'mwrong still is quite informed by
new typography, by some of theseideas that had their origins in
the 1920s.
Ellen Lupton (40:52):
Absolutely. Absolutely. It is our heritage
and grounding moment. And, youknow, the next generation after
Chickhold is represented by MaxBill. And you write in your book
about the big fight they hadbecause Chickhold ultimately
rejected the new typography.
(41:14):
And that really made a lot ofpeople very angry who wanted to
keep that purity of objectiveform going, but to remake it for
the post war world, which MaxBill is the greatest theorist
and practitioner of. Well, hasbeen so fun. Is there anything
(41:35):
else you want to talk about?
Jess Brier (41:37):
I mean there's so many other things in the book. I
just obviously really encourageour listeners to check it out.
It's a really visual book. Thereis also a lot of discussion of
process in terms of collage.Really emphasize that graphic
design was also a collagepractice.
So another reason to be thinkingabout art and design of this
(42:01):
period in tandem, you know,montage is something that we
associate usually with Dada anda lot of Dadaists of course were
also graphic designers, but thiswas also very much a part of the
graphic design field. And yeah,just an incredibly rich period
in terms of the interactions ofart and design and the ideas
coming from these people. Mean,is really the seed of what I'm
(42:24):
interested in is I love theideas of practitioners and I
also find it really fascinatingwhen their ideas have a real
tension with what they actuallymake or the way that what they
make lives in the world. So youknow an artist can have an
intention and then of coursethey make something and it has
its own life. Art and design hasits own life once it goes into
(42:48):
the world and that tension orthat gap is really a fascinating
one to me.
Ellen Lupton (42:53):
Beautiful. I love it. The book is very readable.
So congratulations on writingsomething that is about
theoretical debates andtechnology and form in a way
that's really engaging. Thankyou.
Jess Brier (43:08):
Thank you. Yeah, and I should say too, I really hope
that beyond art historians who Ihope will be interested in the
book I'm really hoping thatartists and designers will be
readers of this book. Mean Ireally hope that the book speaks
to practitioners so Ellen I justreally appreciate you having
this conversation and I mean Ilearn something new about this
(43:29):
topic every time I talk to adesigner so it's really exciting
and wonderful for me. So thankyou.
Ellen Lupton (43:35):
Cool, thanks. Great to meet you.
Jess Brier (43:38):
You too, thank you.
Narrator (43:40):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book NewTypography and the Reinvention
of Photography by Jess Briar isavailable from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.
So
Ellen Lupton (00:05):
many aspects of mass communication are designed
to disappear.
Jess Brier (00:13):
Art and design has its own life once it goes into
the world, and that tension orthat gap is really a fascinating
one.
Ellen Lupton (00:24):
Hi, Jess. How are you doing? Tell us what you're
up to.
Jess Brier (00:29):
Hello, my name is Jess Brier. I'm glad to be here
with you Ellen. I am the curatorof photography at the Francis
Lehman Loeb Art Center at BassarCollege up in the Hudson Valley
in New York And I am now theauthor of New Typography and the
Reinvention of Photography. SoI'm really excited to talk about
(00:51):
the book with you.
Ellen Lupton (00:52):
I love your book. I'm Ellen Lupton, and I'm a
graphic designer, writer,curator. I teach design history,
and I'm fascinated by thisperiod in history. And I think a
lot of historians, arthistorians and designers will be
familiar with the termphotomontage. But your book is
(01:13):
about something different,typophoto,
Jess Brier (01:17):
which was a term used in the 20s by avant garde
designers, but it kind of didn'tstick around. So can you tell us
what typophoto is? Sure. Sotypophoto was a word invented by
Laszlo Moholy Nagy, who was areally fascinating artist and
designer and teacher at theBauhaus. And while he was at the
(01:39):
Bauhaus, he wrote a book calledPainting Photography Film in
1925 and it's actually one ofthe most important texts on
photography written in the1920s.
He was an incredibly prolificwriter and theorist and in that
book he introduced the termtypophoto or typophoto in
German. It's great to have abook title that's a made up
(02:01):
German word. Basically hisexplanation of that was pretty
simple. It was the synthesis oftypography and photography And
he actually predictedinterestingly that images would
replace text ultimately as aform of communication. He really
believed in newer media.
Photography was still relativelynew at the time and the mass
(02:24):
circulation of photography wasmuch more new. He predicted that
eventually we would stop usingtype and text and we would use
images as forms ofcommunication, primary forms of
communication. So I often thinkof this when I use an emoji or
something. You know, I thinkhe'd be really fascinated by the
world that we live in now. Hewas a real believer in new
(02:47):
media.
You know, even though he wastalking about how text would
eventually be obsolete, the termwas picked up by graphic
designers. Jan Schuykold, who'san important figure in this
book, he was a really prolificgraphic designer of the period
who you know well, Ellen. Hepicked up this term and adopted
it as a principle of what hecalled the new typography. So
(03:10):
this new movement of avant gardedesign and he wrote a kind of
manifesto on the new typographythat same year 1925 and one of
its core principles was thatphotography should be used as a
means of illustration. So hekind of assimilated Mahalin
Naj's idea and turned it into aprinciple for graphic design.
(03:32):
So that's really the meat of thebook.
Ellen Lupton (03:34):
Yeah. And he got the word new typography from
Maholy Nagy too, right? So JanCicchold visited the Bauhaus in
1923, and he picked up thisamazing book, the catalog of the
big Bauhaus exhibition designedby Moholy Nagy that featured a
manifesto of typography calledThe New Typography. So it's such
(03:58):
a great story. So you make anargument that photography as a
discourse and a practice wasfundamentally changed by
photomechanical reproduction.
And what is the core technologyof that transformation?
Jess Brier (04:18):
So the technology that transformed photography for
graphic design and for printingwas a halftone process. So this
was actually a process that wasinvented in the 1880s. It
essentially allowed the massprinting of photography on the
same plate as type which reallywas a kind of game changer for
(04:40):
being able to mass reproducephotographs and photographs
would be re photographed througha screen, the halftone screen.
So halftone really refers towhat happens to break up the
tones of the photograph and turnthem into tiny dots. Every
photograph as you know that'sprinted with offset printing in
(05:04):
books and magazines in anyprinted ephemera those are half
tones and I find themfascinating because in order to
see them properly there is anoptical illusion that happens.
So we're actually able to notlook at the dots, but just look
at the image. So halftone refersboth to the process and to the
image, a halftone photograph,for example.
Ellen Lupton (05:27):
And yet we don't notice it. And so many aspects
of mass communication aredesigned to disappear. Right? So
when we read a book, we're notthinking about the fonts. When
we look at a photograph, weimagine the diva on the beach,
not a photographer taking apicture that then gets processed
(05:50):
and retouched in all theseartificial means.
We are delivered the appearanceof reality, right? Or what
Walter Benjamin, the Orchid inthe Land of Technology, right?
It's so beautiful. And yet somany people aren't aware that
the halftone had such an impacton the world and is still so
(06:15):
active today.
Jess Brier (06:17):
And of course, we live in the world of digital
pixels now, right? So thehalftone also preceded the
atomization of images onscreens, right, that we look at
every day. And I think that thatidea of something designed to
disappear, as you're saying,Ellen, this is exactly what I'm
fascinated by both the halftoneand graphic design in general,
(06:39):
right? These things that are notmeant to be looked at
critically, I think are exactlythe things that we should be
looking at critically. And so Iwas really excited to kind of
bring an art historian's eye tothese things that are, as you
say, meant to disappear.
Ellen Lupton (06:55):
And the halftone technology, so it was introduced
in the 1880s. It's older thanthe artist that you're writing
about. So it was new, but notreally new. Right? It's sort of
like my kids growing up with theinternet.
So what did these avant gardeartists they come of age in a
(07:15):
world that's already litteredwith halftone photography. Mass
media is already there, right?It's the water. It's the air.
What did they do to make itdifferent and to create this
revolution in visualcommunication?
Jess Brier (07:37):
So the halftone had existed for a while but it was
still not great. We often thinkabout, I think we have this myth
that photography immediatelyreplaced, you know, sketch
reporting in newspapers andactually that was kind of a
longer process. People wouldcomplain when they saw half
tones in the newspaper at firstthat they were too screeny,
(08:00):
quote
Ellen Lupton (08:01):
unquote. Because they could see the texture,
right?
Jess Brier (08:05):
Yeah, yeah, it was it was really distracting and of
course they were used to sketchreporting that was considered,
you know, a reliable source ofvisual information. So it took a
little while and then offsetprinting really changed the game
for mass communication andoffset printing is something
that these designers were veryadept at using and designing for
(08:27):
offset printing. So this wasreally a much more sophisticated
kind of printing. This is howbooks are still printed today
And with offset printing theywere able to experiment a little
bit more with the form of thehalftone. So the aesthetic
experimentation that they didwith the halftone was you know,
(08:50):
once it had been perfected,people couldn't see those dots
anymore.
Then they thought, well, whydon't we blow it up again and
make it, you know, 10 dpi. Andthey started to really play with
the form of the halftone itself.And it became a form that
communicated ideas abouttechnology, about printing. They
were really showing off whatthey could do with offset
(09:12):
printing.
Ellen Lupton (09:13):
And sort of exposing the medium.
Jess Brier (09:16):
Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And celebrating
technology, which is why theywere so excited about
photography, right? This wasabout what the machine could do,
right? What they could do ascraftsmen working with the
machine.
So that was both the printingmachines and also the machine of
the camera.
Ellen Lupton (09:36):
And so, Mahal Naj in that essay, he talks about
photography as objective. Heuses this beautiful phrase, the
hygiene of the optical. And sothis is a belief and an ideology
about the truth value ofphotography. And that kind of
shifted over the course of the20s had really disappeared by
(10:00):
the 30s. You talk about thisconflict between the objective
and the subjective, thepropaganda and manipulation and
psychology?
Jess Brier (10:11):
Absolutely, yeah. So as you say initially there is
this belief in photography astruthful and and objective and
this is really what Moholyembraces And over time, well he
writes about typophoto in hismanifesto, The New Typography,
(10:33):
as I mentioned, and that isreally kind of telegraphing this
idea of photography as exact andobjective. But then the way that
these principles of newtypography are used is for
advertising. So the kind of mainvehicle for this new kind of
(10:57):
design is meant for persuadingconsumers to buy things. These
designers are making design forthe purposes of consumer
propaganda.
The way that they actually usephotography is really not very
objective. They are more andmore embracing photo montage
(11:17):
literally cutting and pastingpieces of photographs
reconfiguring them on the page,using retouching to manipulate
those fragments of photographsto make advertising that looks
very different from advertisingtoday but it's familiar in the
sense that it's veryassociative. It's meant to evoke
(11:38):
emotions and abstract ideas, notso much pure objective facts,
right? That's not really theeffectiveness of advertising.
Advertising is effective becauseit makes us feel things and it
makes us remember things thatare strange and interesting,
right?
I speak to students aboutadvertising and the ads that
(12:01):
they remember are, you know, thegeico gecko, which has nothing
to do with insurance, right? Butit's, it's a funny animal that
talks, right? These are thetropes of advertising, things
that catch our attention, thatseem strange and kind of surreal
and absurd, right? So that issomething that I find really
(12:21):
fascinating with these designsthat they're talking about
objectivity and yet they'remaking designs that are kind of
surreal and bizarre and anythingbut objective and they're really
using photography to do that.
Ellen Lupton (12:38):
So, Moholy Naj wrote about how type could
become photographic. So thehalftone process was literally
about turning photos into typethat could be printed
letterpress or offset. Butinitially letterpress at the
(12:59):
same height as metal type. Thiswas revolutionary because before
1880s you couldn't put aphotograph and type together. So
the halftone literally turnedphotographs into typography,
into a typographic block, aprocess block.
(13:19):
But Moholy Nagy also wrote abouthow typography could become
photographic. And there are somebeautiful this is more
experimental and certainly notpart of mainstream advertising.
It's more of a thoughtexperiment and a technology
experiment. And there's somebeautiful examples of this in
(13:41):
your book. Can you try to bringto life in our listeners' minds
what some of these type as photoexperiments look like?
Jess Brier (13:52):
Yeah, so more and more they were experimenting
with photography in lots ofdifferent ways. So I mentioned
photo montage. Another kind ofexperiment was with what are
called photograms, so cameraless photographs that are made
by placing objects onphotosensitive paper, exposing
(14:14):
them to light, and they would dothis sometimes with stencils. So
some of these designersincluding Moholy Nagy, the
Russian designer El Lizitsky whowas prolific in this period and
Jan Chikholt all made designssome of which were printed most
of which were just kind ofexperiments that they did in
(14:35):
their their studios that I foundin archives. But these were were
photograms that were reallymostly typographic but they were
made through through thisphotographic process.
And then there are some otherlots of other examples of
actually using layeringhalftones on one another in ways
(14:59):
that kind of play up the waythat light passes through
objects in a sort ofphotographic way. So really
using the language ofprintmaking to then evoke the
idea of photography of kind oflight and shadow playing and
then a lot of kind ofexperiments with creating
(15:23):
designs where there's a kind ofreversal of positive and
negative so using white andblack contrast and really
evoking the again the idea ofphotography not necessarily the
medium of photography but usingtypographic forms and processes
to do that. So I kind ofdiscovered this whole world of
(15:48):
typo photo beyond beyond simplyputting type and photographs
together, right? This otherlayer of meaning behind
typophoto, as Mahalin Naj wroteabout.
Ellen Lupton (16:02):
Right. And the overprinting of type onto
pictures was definitely anemerging language mass media
that wouldn't have been typicalin a newspaper in the 1890s, for
example. There's a particularfont from the 20s that was
(16:22):
marketed to designers andprinters as the ultimate
typeface of photo montage. Thiswas the only font you should use
if you were serious about photomontage. Tell us about that font
and who created it.
Jess Brier (16:38):
So the font is Futura. It was the predecessor
of all of the sans seriftypefaces that we see today,
including Helvetica, which isprobably familiar to most of our
listeners. This is a verycommonly used font especially
for commercial design. Futurawas invented by Paul Renner in
(16:59):
1927. As you say it was marketedas the perfect companion to
photo montage and photomontagethe perfect companion to Futura.
And of course the name sayseverything about the intention
of this font. Sans serif typelike photography was thought of
as a modern type by thesegraphic designers. Sans Serif
(17:22):
indicated futurity, futura,modernization, utopia, a kind of
new future that they wereinterested in creating.
Ellen Lupton (17:32):
And Futura is more than just sans serif. It also
has this very strong geometricidentity. Like the O's are
perfect circles or seeminglyperfect and the M's are
triangular. This made it verydifferent from the so called
anonymous grotesques that werethe alternative to Futura that
(17:54):
had already existed. You couldfind in a normal print shop
these sort of sturdy workhousegrotesque sans serifs.
But Renner wanted to create atruly modern sans serif. And
Futura today remains one of themost popular typefaces in the
world. And in fact, many of ourlisteners, if you look at your
(18:17):
font menu, there will be aversion of Futura in your list
of loaded typefaces on yourcomputer. So if you want to be
modern, try Futura. Helvetica isa bit more speaking back to that
anonymous sans, and Futuraembraces the geometric ideology
(18:42):
of the Bauhaus and functionalismat its height and is still just
so popular.
And in fact, when NASA landed onthe moon, the sign that they put
there is printed in Futura.
Jess Brier (18:57):
I didn't know that. That's fascinating.
Ellen Lupton (19:00):
The future. Yeah. One of my students wrote an
incredible book called Never UseFutura because it's sort of a
truism in art school to avoidusing this font because it's
overused. And anyway, he didthis beautiful history of Futura
that I highly recommend to allof you. Great.
Never use Futura. And Renneractually founded his own art
(19:24):
school or taught in an artschool that was quite different
from the Bauhaus. So tell usabout that art school.
Jess Brier (19:32):
Yeah, so in 1927 Paul Renner was living in Munich
which was not a cityparticularly associated with
modernism or avant garde art anddesign but there were some
really interesting people livingthere and who moved there
because of the founding of thisschool. So Paul Renner founded
(19:54):
the Meisterschule furDeutschland's Buchtruke which
was there's not a greattranslation for Meisterschule
but master school is about theclosest we have in English. So
the school for German bookprinters. So the school is
actually founded to train futureproprietors of printing houses.
(20:16):
So they were learning about newprint technology but also
scientific business managementwhich was a fairly new field and
also of course the traditions oftypography, schwift form, letter
form, a design which has a longand very proud history in
(20:40):
Germany.
So it was really this marriageof kind of deep German
traditions of typography withthis very modern education in
printing and in business. PaulRenner taught there and
eventually Jan Chichold taughtthere as well. So this is how I
learned about the MeisterSchule. This is not a very well
(21:01):
known school, unlike the Bauhausbut one of Chichol's archives
holds a number of papers andstudent designs and faculty
designs from that program and Ireally became fascinated by it
because this is where a lot ofhalftone experimentation was
taking place.
Ellen Lupton (21:21):
It is an incredible student work in your
book. Tell us about that. Helpus see it.
Jess Brier (21:29):
Yeah, so I'm going to look at these images while I
talk about them because they'rereally great examples of what
we've been talking about, youknow, print offset printing
especially and and letterpressto show off what design can do
and what printing techniques cando. So overlapping montaged half
(21:55):
tones blowing them up showingthe dot pattern overlapping
different colors so of courseonly one color could be printed
at a time so we have there'sthis great design by an unknown
designer that features thesefragmented half tones. They're
(22:15):
flowers. One is printed blue,yellow, and red. And then of
course they make green and akind of purple as as they
overlap one another and it'sit's really just this kind of it
creates this kind of abstractbouquet of color and type and
(22:35):
and flowers and it's really justshowing off you know what they
can do with with print withcolor and with the halftone.
So other sort of experiments youknow around making making type
more photographic, makingphotographs more typographic. I
(22:56):
mean this was really a richterritory for experimenting and
of course these are studentassignments so what better place
to do that experimentationright? These are not commissions
for a job these are not forclients so I think some of the
richest experimentation actuallyhappened in this setting, in
(23:16):
this educational setting, whichis a real testament to the
pedagogy.
Ellen Lupton (23:22):
Yeah, and that piece is really a demonstration
of the printing process, thusexposing the process, which is
also intriguing in relation topsychological theory at the
time. And you have a wholechapter about the psychology of
perception. And it has alwaysfascinated me that the kind of
(23:43):
scientific diagrams used todemonstrate perception then
became a model for what a goodlogo should look like, you know,
or what an icon for a bathroomsign, you know, all those things
feed on the language of thescientific diagram, the
(24:03):
demonstration. So tell us aboutperceptual research.
Jess Brier (24:09):
Sure. So one of the rabbit holes I had to go down
for this project was tounderstand what these designers
meant when they talked aboutlegibility. So they were very
insistent about the legibilityof sans serif type and also of
(24:29):
about the legibility ofphotography. So I thought I had
a sense of what that meant. Iknew of course some of the
associations they were makingwith photography but what does
legibility mean?
What does it mean for somethingto be more readable? And where
this led me was to to look atapplied psychology research.
(24:51):
This was a huge field in theearly part of the twentieth
century And it was a veryexperimental field. So graphic
design is also a new field inthe 20s. It's really just kind
of finding its footing.
And so to lend credibility tothis new field, they're looking
to science to say, this is whatresearch says about what is
(25:14):
legible. Now what's interestingabout applied psychology is that
it is largely funded by theadvertising industry. And so
what legibility means isefficiency, speed, right? The
kind of reading that we wantpeople to do when they read
advertisements is fast, right?They are flipping through a
newspaper or a magazine orlooking at a billboard.
(25:37):
These are the forms ofadvertising in the 1920s. We
need to make things readablevery quickly and then we need
things to be memorable. And sothey created lab experiments to
try to replicate the conditionsof reading but of course in a
very artificial way. No one ishooked up to an eye tracking
(26:01):
machine when they're reading amagazine for example so they
would create these kinds ofapparatuses which by the way
relied on photographictechnology to do things like eye
tracking. To learn about how theeye moves around an image to
think about the legibility ofimages and they devised all
(26:26):
kinds of these experiments andthey as you say they're often
using abstract images that thenbecome the kind of prototype for
logos later on.
So it's really feeding rightinto the advertising industry
both in its funding and in itsapplication, right, it's applied
(26:48):
psychology. This is what theymean by legible. They mean
efficient. The new typographersalso use the word economic,
which is not an accident, right?Very much the language of
capitalism is behind this.
And you know you can imagineanother kind of legibility. Know
when you read a novel, forexample, you might choose to
(27:08):
read slowly because it's areally enjoyable experience. And
I find these ads to also bethings that I want to linger on.
They are interesting to look atfor a long time. They're not
meant to be looked at closely,but there is another kind of
experience that comes out oflooking at them very closely.
(27:29):
So the legibility they wereafter was something quite
specific. And these experimentsended up becoming as I said kind
of the backing for those ideasof graphic designers and they
circulated through more kind ofpopular psychology texts that
then were picked up and quotedin trade journals for
(27:50):
typographers, for printers, forgraphic designers.
Ellen Lupton (27:53):
And were there principles that were really
useful? Like I think I've read alot of legibility studies
related to type, which basicallyeveryone wants to prove that
sans serif type is more or lesslegible, and all of this stuff
has basically failed. Were thereprinciples related to the
legibility of photography thatare really legitimate or useful?
Jess Brier (28:19):
Well, not really. Where photography was very
useful to applied psychology wasas a metaphor for what happens
in in perception. So photographyat this time especially in the
20s and 30s was often talkedabout as a surrogate for the
(28:43):
human eye, A kind of Uberversion of the human eye,
something that could faithfullyrecord what it sees and imprint
itself, right? That's literallywhat happens when you make a
photograph. And that's how theyunderstood memory to work, that
you would see something and ifit was memorable enough, it
(29:04):
would imprint itself on themind.
They were speakingmetaphorically about the
workings of memory and usingphotography as a way to
visualize that and materializethat. They were actually
understanding images to beimprinted on the mind as though
it's a piece of paper, right? Asthough it's a substrate that you
(29:25):
could print on. They talkedabout memory value and it's
again no coincidence that theword value is being used. They
would talk about attentionvalue, memory value, things that
were quantifiable and thereforewere able to be monetized
ultimately.
So photography was very usefulto them both as a technology for
(29:48):
studying reading and perceptionand also as a metaphor for
helping them to communicate whatthe results of these studies
were. And then of course, theywere also using halftone
printing to reproduce the imagesthat they were using as
scientific evidence, right, aspieces of evidence for this
research.
Ellen Lupton (30:06):
So you talk about this oscillation between reading
and seeing that is part of howwe perceive photography. Of
course, it's essential toreading itself, to type, that we
are reading the words andtherefore forgetting the
phonetic system and certainlythe font. But then we flip back
(30:27):
and forth between this abilityto see the form on the page or
on the screen and the seemingtransparency of absorbing the
language in the case oftypography. Tell me how that
works with photography, theseeing versus reading, this
oscillation. It seems likethat's one of your arguments in
(30:49):
the book.
Jess Brier (30:50):
Yes, this is something that these designers
are doing with both type andphotography is really playing
with, you know, the fact thatobviously all letter forms are
also visual images, right? Theyare put together to make text
and we understand how to readthem as such because we learn
(31:11):
how to read. But we also readimages and they were very aware
of that and again this kind ofassociation of photography with
truth with the idea thatphotography is a form of
information, visual information,this really lends itself to this
idea that we also read images.And it's interesting because
(31:33):
reading images meansinterpreting images and you
wouldn't think that they wouldreally want to leave a lot of
room for interpretation. Again,we're talking about advertising,
we're talking about commercialdesign that's meant to be
glanced at and then rememberedlater.
But there is a kind of laborinvolved and this is what I find
(31:55):
really interesting about all ofthese experiments is it really
highlights how much work thereader has to do as a reader, as
a viewer, right? The oscillationas you're describing between
seeing and reading,understanding how an image
relates to a text, is oneexplaining the other, are they
(32:15):
in conflict? Often inadvertising the text and the
image don't actually seem likethey have a lot to do with one
another and so you have to dothe work of connecting those
dots. Advertising plays onassociation. We are remembering
things but again that logodoesn't necessarily illustrate a
(32:36):
fact about what is beingadvertised.
It is illustrating somethingmemorable that hopefully you
will learn to associate with thefeeling that you might get if
you buy this product, right?There's a there's a lot of work
that actually goes into readingadvertising and reading any
graphic design, think. And so,know, with photography, they
(32:58):
know that photographs have allof these associations. Again
with with modern technology,with the future, progress, all
of this is very conditioned bykind of this moment between the
wars that these are being madeand they're playing on those
(33:19):
associations and relying on thereader really as a kind of co
creator of those designs bydoing that labor of seeing,
reading, knowing when to dowhich thing and putting it all
together in their mind.
Ellen Lupton (33:33):
Yeah, and I think it's also an oscillation between
our accepting the truth of thescene in a photograph versus the
fact that it's ink on paper,that it's a surface, that it's
artifice. And so you talk a lotin the book about this myth of
objectivity and technologicalpurity, right? Hands off, right?
(33:58):
The mechanical eye. And then theincredible amount of handwork
involved in actually making aphotograph ready for print.
And we still do this today withPhotoshop. Tell us about that
handwork in this world of thephotographic object.
Jess Brier (34:22):
Sure. So the term that we use, the sort of
umbrella term we use isretouching to make photographs
ready for print.
Ellen Lupton (34:30):
I love the tactility of that retouching.
It's amazing. It's abouttouching. And there's so many
images of the hand in modernism.Like that could be a whole book,
you know, the hand, the hand,the hand.
And yet we obsess over themechanical eye and the removal
of the hand. But this realm ofretouching, which was often done
(34:55):
by, printing technologists,technicians, lower paid people,
women. That, you know, what wasinvolved in that retouching?
Jess Brier (35:09):
Yeah, I mean, even the word makes it sound like a
tiny intervention and of courseit's a complete transformation.
So this was one of my owndefinitions of typophoto was
that retouching is another formof truly blending typography and
photography because when aphotograph is prepared for
(35:30):
printing and I'll speak about1925 not today it's a different
process obviously and that's notmy wheelhouse but one hundred
years ago that process washighly tactile as you're
describing Ellen and retouchingwas really an umbrella term that
encompassed a lot of differenttechniques including carving
(35:52):
into negatives. So before aphotograph was even printed
manipulating negatives obviouslyphoto montage is part of the
process of retouching. There'ssomething called silhouetting
where a fragment is sort of cutout of a photograph right we
only want the product that'sbeing sold and then around the
(36:14):
edges there's this kind of softfading away and there's no
background because of course youwant a kind of white background
or a color or something todecontextualize that object and
help us focus on that object.Then you know halftones were for
(36:35):
a lot of advertisers wereconsidered kind of drab for all
of their excitement aboutphotography.
They didn't really like the waythat photography looked. And so
retouching included, you know,drawing and painting on to
halftones and airbrushing. So anactual airbrush, right, which
(36:56):
precedes the digital version ofairbrushing. All of these layers
of very tedious handwork andcraft really that made
photographs into these kind ofshiny perfect crisp images that
(37:17):
everything was perfectlyoutlined and there's some nice
illustrations in the book ofsort of comparing the so called
bare halftone which was just youknow gray and unexciting
unappealing according toadvertisers and it needed to be
punched up for print through allof these processes of
(37:39):
retouching. And so what you getin the end is are these images
that technically are photographsbut they look so uncanny.
Think especially to us right welook at ads that include
photography from this period andI mean I just find them
(38:01):
completely fascinating becauseit looks nothing like any kind
of other photography you knowbecause of this layering process
and because of this truetransformation that happens to
prepare them to be printed.
Ellen Lupton (38:15):
Yeah, the tools today are really not that
different. They're just digitaland they still require a high
degree of manual skill in orderto smooth out the edges and
silhouette objects. AI is makingit easier, but that's happening
fast. So in a way, book is aboutpedagogy. Do you want to say
(38:40):
anything about the teaching ofdesign?
Jess Brier (38:44):
Sure. I mean, the well, the Bauhaus obviously is
our touchstone for thinkingabout how art and design
pedagogy changed in this period.Ellen, you mentioned the kind of
pure what Chicole would call thepure forms of Futura, right? The
perfect circle is the O and thetriangles that made the M or the
N. These are ideas that werereally coming through in
(39:06):
pedagogy of the period.
This was a time when, as I said,graphic design was a new field
and so it was really born in anew version of the art school
where artists and designersfirst of all were trained
together. So the Meister Schuleis a little bit of a different
example, but in the Bauhaus, youknow, weavers, painters,
(39:27):
architects, graphic designers,everyone was trained in things
like color theory, trained touse forms, to experiment with
forms through differentmaterials, and then they would
go on to specialize in differentareas. So there was an idea that
art and design were intimatelyrelated. This came through
really strongly in pedagogy anda lot of these artists really
(39:51):
believed in art and design asclosely related. I often find it
bizarre that we study arthistory and design history so
separately, which is one of thereasons I wanted to write this
book that I think these thingsneed to be studied and written
about together because that'sexactly how the people making
these things, know, the artistsand designers were thinking
(40:13):
about it.
But the way that those ideaswere taught had a huge impact on
these experimental designs. Andthen after World War II,
obviously many of thesedesigners fled Germany. We're
talking about design mostly inGermany. And many of these
designers had to flee to eitherother parts of Western Europe or
(40:35):
to The United States and theirideas went with them. So design
pedagogy after the war and Iwould say up to the present day
Ellen you can tell me if I'mwrong still is quite informed by
new typography, by some of theseideas that had their origins in
the 1920s.
Ellen Lupton (40:52):
Absolutely. Absolutely. It is our heritage
and grounding moment. And, youknow, the next generation after
Chickhold is represented by MaxBill. And you write in your book
about the big fight they hadbecause Chickhold ultimately
rejected the new typography.
(41:14):
And that really made a lot ofpeople very angry who wanted to
keep that purity of objectiveform going, but to remake it for
the post war world, which MaxBill is the greatest theorist
and practitioner of. Well, hasbeen so fun. Is there anything
(41:35):
else you want to talk about?
Jess Brier (41:37):
I mean there's so many other things in the book. I
just obviously really encourageour listeners to check it out.
It's a really visual book. Thereis also a lot of discussion of
process in terms of collage.Really emphasize that graphic
design was also a collagepractice.
So another reason to be thinkingabout art and design of this
(42:01):
period in tandem, you know,montage is something that we
associate usually with Dada anda lot of Dadaists of course were
also graphic designers, but thiswas also very much a part of the
graphic design field. And yeah,just an incredibly rich period
in terms of the interactions ofart and design and the ideas
coming from these people. Mean,is really the seed of what I'm
(42:24):
interested in is I love theideas of practitioners and I
also find it really fascinatingwhen their ideas have a real
tension with what they actuallymake or the way that what they
make lives in the world. So youknow an artist can have an
intention and then of coursethey make something and it has
its own life. Art and design hasits own life once it goes into
(42:48):
the world and that tension orthat gap is really a fascinating
one to me.
Ellen Lupton (42:53):
Beautiful. I love it. The book is very readable.
So congratulations on writingsomething that is about
theoretical debates andtechnology and form in a way
that's really engaging. Thankyou.
Jess Brier (43:08):
Thank you. Yeah, and I should say too, I really hope
that beyond art historians who Ihope will be interested in the
book I'm really hoping thatartists and designers will be
readers of this book. Mean Ireally hope that the book speaks
to practitioners so Ellen I justreally appreciate you having
this conversation and I mean Ilearn something new about this
(43:29):
topic every time I talk to adesigner so it's really exciting
and wonderful for me. So thankyou.
Ellen Lupton (43:35):
Cool, thanks. Great to meet you.
Jess Brier (43:38):
You too, thank you.
Narrator (43:40):
This has been a University of Minnesota Press
production. The book NewTypography and the Reinvention
of Photography by Jess Briar isavailable from University of
Minnesota Press. Thank you forlistening.
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