The Making of Visual News by Thierry Gervais

Author:Thierry Gervais [Gervais, Thierry]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781474295192
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dramatizing the news

In England the first number of the weekly Picture Post appeared on October 1, 1938, published by Edward Hulton with Stefan Lorant as editor in chief. Its success was on the same scale as Life's: after an initial print run of 700,000, it had a circulation of 1.7 million by the spring of 1939.35 The graphics of its first covers were directly inspired by Life, but the layout and the role of photography were an extension of editorial practices Lorant had been working on for a decade.

Not long after his arrival in London in 1934, Lorant had picked up where he had left off as a pressman and began working on the new formula for the magazine Clarion, published by Odhams Press. He gave it a news focus, changed its name to Weekly Illustrated (1934-1939) and published the work of photographers he had met in Germany, among them Brassaï, Alfred Eisenstaedt and Fritz Goro.36 In July 1937, as a personal venture, he launched the magazine Lilliput (1937-1960), a small format (19 x 13 cm) monthly of a hundred or so pages whose cover, interest in photography and general style were reminiscent of those of UHU, published by Ullstein in Berlin. Lilliput included articles, short stories, illustrations and photographs published as a section apart, independently of the texts and, as a general rule, with one per page. The photographers on its credits list had been working in photojournalism since the 1920s: Felix H. Man, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Erich Salomon and Tim Gidal, whom Lorant knew from the Münchner Illustrierte Presse; the Parisians Erwin Blumenfeld, Brassaï, André Kertész, Philippe Halsman, Germaine Krull, Robert Capa, Emmanuel Sougez and Pierre Verger; and the Englishmen Bill Brandt and Cecil Beaton. The magazine's photographic sections were enlivened by visual associations created by Lorant, and there were double-page pairs of images that triggered meaningful thematic and formal comparisons. Humor was a key aspect of the image associations: in 1937 Lorant set a photograph of a woman at the hairdresser's with her hair hooked into a network of electric curlers, captioned "Almost ready", alongside one of a spiky-crested bird, captioned "Ready".37 Satire also provided an outlet for Lorant's political opinions, with plenty of double pages deriding fascism in Europe and German Nazism in particular: one portrait of a bellowing Hitler brandishing his fists was titled "The German Head of State" and paired with an image of a chimp in similar pose and the caption "The Terror of the Zoo"38 (see Figure 3.5). This kind of juxtaposition was eloquent in itself, but was always backed up by a caption. At Lilliput Lorant made use of the network of photographers he had built up in the preceding years, and his association of aesthetic and political concerns was proof of real savoir-faire in the image field. By the spring of 1938 the magazine had a circulation of 75,000 and a balanced budget.39 Lorant was then approached by Hulton Press, with an offer to buy Lilliput and launch an illustrated magazine:

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