75 Years of CIA Maps Now Declassified & Made Available Online

in Design, History, Maps | December 20th, 2016

Satellite-connected devices do all the hard work of navigation for us: plan journeys, plot distances, tell us where we are and where we’re going. The age of the highly skilled cartographer may be coming to an end. But in the past few hundred years—since European states began carving the world between them—the winners of colonial contests, World War battles, and Cold War skirmishes were often those who had the best maps. In addition to their indispensable role in seafaring and battle strategy, “good maps,” writes Danny Lewis at Smithsonian, have been “an integral part of the tradecraft of espionage.”

The CIA will tell you as much… or they will now, at least, since they’ve declassified decades of once-secret maps from the days when they “relied on geographers and cartographers for planning and executing operations around the world” rather than on “digital mapping technologies and satellite images.”

Now celebrating its 75th anniversary, the CIA’s Cartography Center boasts of “a long, proud history of service to the Intelligence Community,” at the Agency’s friendly website; “Since 1941, the Cartography Center maps have told the stories of post-WWII reconstruction, the Suez crisis, the Cuban Missile crisis, the Falklands War, and many other important events in history.”

Whatever noble or nefarious roles the Agency may have played in these and hundreds of other events, we can now see–thanks to this new online gallery at Flickr–what presidents, Directors, and field agents saw when they planned their actions, beginning with the country’s first “non-departmental intelligence organization,” the COI (Office of the Coordinator of Information). Once the U.S. entered WWII, it became the Office of Strategic Services (OSS). The Cartography Center’s first chief, Arthur Robinson, was only 26 and a graduate student in geography when COI director William Donovan recruited him to lead the organization. The office rapidly expanded during the war, and by 1943, “geographers and cartographers amassed what would be the largest collection of maps in the world.”

In the early forties, “map layers were drafted by hand using pen and ink on translucent acetate sheets mounted on large Strathmore boards.” These drafts were typically four times larger than the printed maps themselves, one of which you can see at the top of the post, “The Russian Front in Review.” In the fifties, “improved efficiency in map compilation and construction” produced visually striking documents like that further up from 1955, “USSR: Regional Distribution of Gross National Product.” Not a map, but what we would call an infographic, this image shows how the Cartography Center performed services far in excess of the usual map app—visualizing threats to the U.S. from Cuban surface-to-air missile sites in 1962 (above) and threats to the African elephant population from poachers in 2013 (below). Further down, you can see a 2003 map of Baghdad, with the ominously non-threatening note printed at the top and right, “This map is NOT to be used for TARGETING.”

These maps and many more can be found at the CIA Cartography Flickr account, which has a category for each decade since the 1940s. Each map is downloadable in low to high resolution scans. In addition, one category, “Cartography Tools,” features high-quality photography of vintage draughtsman’s instruments, all of them, like the German-made ink pens further down, symbols of the painstaking handicraft mapmaking once required. While we can probably draw any number of political lessons or historical theses from a deep analysis of this deep state archive, what it seems to ask of us first and foremost is that we consider cartography as not only a useful discipline but as a fine art.

As the Cartography Center’s first director put it, “a map should be aesthetically pleasing, thought-provoking, and communicative.” Given these standards we might see how current technology, for all its tremendous ease of use and undeniable utility, might improve by looking to maps of the past. Visit the CIA’s flickr gallery here.

via Smithsonian

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture

in Design, Music | October 21st, 2016

David Bowie, in his years at Bromley Technical High School before becoming David Bowie, studied not just music but art and design as well. Despite becoming a rock star, he never forgot about the importance of the visual, a sensibility manifest in the performances he put on, the personae he assumed, and the music videos in which he starred right up until his death earlier this year. After his success, the artist also became a full-fledged art connoisseur, and next month Sotheby’s will hold Bowie/Collector, a series of three auctions “encompassing over 350 works from the private collection of the legendary musician.”

The first two auctions will sell Bowie’s modern and contemporary art; the third will focus entirely on his collection of furniture and other pieces of design by Ettore Sottsass and the Memphis Group. Even if you haven’t heard of the Memphis Group, you’ve certainly seen their furniture. “It’s Pee-Wee’s Playhouse meets Miami Vice,” in the words of Alissa Walker at Gizmodo. “It’s Saved By The Bell plus Beetlejuice.” As the postmodern wing of the 1980s Art Deco revival, Memphis “combined overtly geometric shapes from a variety of materials in bright, contrasting colors. Graphic patterns — usually black and white — were not unusual.”

Image by Zanone, via Wikimedia Commons

Memphis, whose influence has extended far beyond the movement’s official lifetime of 1981 to 1988, began “when Ettore Sottsass, one of Italy’s architectural grandees, met with a group of younger architects in his apartment on Milan’s Via San Galdino,” according to Design Museum. (Sottass had made his name with, among other things, Olivetti’s bright-red Valentine portable typewriter.) “They were there to discuss Sottsass’ plans to produce a line of furniture with an old friend, Renzo Brugola, owner of a carpentry workshop,” an idea that turned into “an exuberant two-fingered salute to the design establishment after years in which color and decoration had been taboo.”

Why call it Memphis? During the meeting, the group put on Bob Dylan’s song “Stuck Inside of Mobile (With the Memphis Blues Again),” which gave Sottass the inspiration. “Everyone thought it was a great name,” wrote Memphis member, and later Memphis chronicler, Barbara Radice, with its evocations of “Blues, Tennessee, rock’n’roll, American suburbs, and then Egypt, the Pharoahs’ capital, the holy city of the god, Ptah.” This aesthetic foment eventually produced such items found in the Bowie collection as Michele de Lucchi’s Flamingo side table, Peter Shire’s Bel Air armchair, Achille and Pier Giacomo Castiglioni’s friendly-looking radio-phonograph, and Sottass’ own Carlton room divider, the most popular Memphis object and one still made today.

Always aesthetically polarizing, Memphis has undergone a bit of a revival in recent years: younger designers have looked to the group for ideas, and its surviving members have heard a new call for their special brand of bold colors and striking geometry. In the video at the top of the post, gallerists Leo Koenig, Margaret Liu Clinton, and Joe Sheftel show and tell about Memphis, and in the subsequent videos you can learn more about Sottsass’ life and times and the memories of Memphis designer Mattheo Thun. Call the fruits of the Memphis Group’s labors dated if you like — “it just looks like the 80s,” writes Walker — but they’re dated, like many a Bowie or Dylan record, in the best way: undeniably time-stamped, yet somehow always fresh.

Charles & Ray Eames’ Iconic Lounge Chair Debuts on American TV (1956)

David Bowie Paper Dolls Recreate Some of the Style Icon’s Most Famous Looks

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

in Data, Design, History | September 21st, 2016

Few people have done more to accurately foresee and help shape the century ahead of them as W.E.B. Du Bois. And perhaps few intellectuals from the early twentieth century still have as much critical relevance to our contemporary global crises. Du Bois’ incisive sociology of racism in The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction in America, and his articles for the NAACP’s journal, The Crisis, remained rooted in a transcontinental awareness that anticipated globalism as it critiqued tribalism. Du Bois, who studied in Berlin and traveled widely in Europe, Africa, and Latin America, also became one of the most influential of Pan-Africanist thinkers, uniting the anti-colonial concerns of African and Caribbean nations with the post-Reconstruction issues of Black Americans.

In 1900, Du Bois attended the First Pan-African Conference, held in London at Westminster Hall just prior to the Paris Exhibition. Attendees presented papers on “the African origins of human civilization,” writes Ramla Bandele at Northwestern’s Global Mappings, on African self-government, and on the imperial aggression of European countries (including the host country). Du Bois arrived armed with what might have seemed like a dull offering to some: a collection of statistics. But not just any collection of statistics. Though they’re now an often banal staple of our everyday working lives, his presentation used then-innovative charts and graphs to condense his data into a powerful set of images.

Once again anticipating global trends of over a century hence, the activist and sociology professor at Atlanta University created around 60 eye-catching data visualizations, “charts and maps,” writes the blog All My Eyes, “hand drawn and colored at the turn of the 19th century” by Du Bois and his students.

For audiences at the time, these must have packed the evidentiary punch that Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow or Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations” have recently. Du Bois and his students’ charts show us—as the first “slide” at the top of the post notes—“the condition of the descendants of former African slaves now resident in the United States of America.”

The collection of infographics, Danny Lewis argues at The Smithsonian, “is just as revolutionary now as it was when it was first created,” for an exhibit Du Bois organized with a lawyer named Thomas J. Calloway and his occasional rival Booker T. Washington. “This was less than half a century after the end of American slavery,” writes Allison Meier at Hyperallergic, “and at a time when human zoos displaying people from colonized countries in replicas of their homes were still common.” In the U.S., the grotesque stereotypes of blackface minstrels provided the primary depiction of African-American life.

“Du Bois’ students,” writes data blog Seeing Complexity, “made a radical decision when they visualized the economic plight of a group explicitly excluded from statistical analysis and thus hidden from international attention.” The level of detail—for Du Bois’ time and ours—is overwhelming, reminding us that “the simple act of disseminating information can, in itself, be a radically and potentially transformative act.” In one of Du Bois’ graphic studies, “The Georgia Negro,” he quotes his key line from The Souls of Black Folk, “The problem of the 20th century is the problem of the color-line.” Far too much current data demonstrates that the statement still holds true in the 21st century, as gross disparities in wealth and in the criminal justice system grimly persist, or worsen, along racial lines.

Data may not be as transformative as Du Bois had hoped, but it forces us to confront the reality of the situation—and either rationalize the status quo or seek to change it. One of three parts of the exhibit, The Georgia Negro study was Du Bois’ “most important contribution to the project,” writes Professor Eugene Provenzo in his book on the subject. The charts are truly impressive for their distillation of “an enormous amount of statistical data,” drawn from “sources such as the United States Census, the Atlanta University Reports, and various governmental reports that had been compiled by Du Bois for groups such as the United States Bureau of Labor.” (Much of the data would have gone uncollected were it not for Du Bois’ tireless efforts.)

The charts are also, Provenzo notes, “remarkable in terms of their design,” as you can see for yourself. Du Bois and his students committed to “examining everything,” Meier writes, quoting Slate’s Rebecca Onion, “from the value of household and kitchen furniture to the ‘rise of the negroes from slavery to freedom in one generation.’” And they did so in a way that still looks “strikingly vibrant and modern, almost anticipating the crossing lines of Piet Mondrian or the intersecting shapes of Wassily Kandinsky.” However much their creators had explicitly modernist intentions, these designs also draw from historical techniques in data visualization—from 17th century scientific texts to Florence Nightingale’s revolutionary 19th century epidemiological maps.

You can view and download scans of all the hand-drawn Du Bois’ Pan-African Conference charts and graphs at the Library of Congress. There, you’ll also find other features of the Du Bois/Calloway/Washington Exhibit, including photographs of several African-American men who had “received appointment as clerks in civil service departments… through competitive examinations” and a “hand-lettered description of Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute” in Virginia. Du Bois’ description of his project says as much about his sense of Black Nationalism as it does about pride in the progress made a generation after slavery: “an honest straightforward exhibit of a small nation of people, picturing their life and development without apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves.”

via Hyperallergic/All My Eyes/Seeing Complexity/Slate

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Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

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Every Exhibition Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presented in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

in Archives, Art, Design | September 19th, 2016

Images courtesy of MoMA

We all hate it when we hear of an exciting exhibition, only to find out that it closed last week — or 80 years ago. New York’s Museum of Modern Art has made great strides toward taking the sting out of such narrowly or widely-missed cultural opportunities with their new digital exhibition archive. The archive offers, in the words of Chief of Archives Michelle Elligott, “free and unprecedented access to The Museum of Modern Art’s ever-evolving exhibition history” in the form of “thousands of unique and vital materials including installation photographs, out-of-print exhibition catalogues, and more, beginning with MoMA’s very first exhibition in 1929,” a show of post-Impressionist paintings by Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, and Van Gogh.

The photograph of Andy Warhol’s Marilyn Monroe portraits at the top of the post comes from a much more recent exhibition, 2015’s Andy Warhol: Campbell’s Soup Cans and Other Works, 1953–1967. But MoMA, of course, didn’t just just discover the king of pop art last year: search by his name and you’ll find no fewer than 128 shows that have included his work, starting with Recent Drawings U.S.A. in 1956.

You can track any number of other cultural icons through the museum’s history: Yoko Ono, for instance, a view of whose One Woman Show, 1960–1971, which also opened in 2015, appears above, but whose work you can see in eleven different exhibitions archived online.

A look through even a fraction of the 3,500 shows whose materials MoMA has so far made available (and public-domain) reveals a thematic variety throughout the museum’s entire existence: not just individual artists or groups of them, but fast cars (the idea of a “rational automobile” in general in the 1960s and the Jaguar E‑Type in particular in the 90s), travel posters, Japanese architecture (featuring an entire traditional Japanese house built in and shipped from Nagoya for the occasion), and the font Helvetica. You can also have a look at the materials archived from the various film series and performance programs they’ve put on over the years.

This sort of technological innovation demonstrates that MoMA has, since that moment in the late 1920s when “a small group of enterprising patrons of the arts joined forces to create a new museum devoted exclusively to modern art,” remained as exciting an institution as ever. But nothing can replace the experience of actually going there and seeing its exhibitions in person, which is why, whenever I pay a visit to its digital archive, I’ll also click over to its calendar of upcoming shows. For 86 years, it has given the public the chance to experience the thrill of the modern, but as a trip through the digital archive reveals, the thrill of the modern goes much deeper than the shock of the new.

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The Guggenheim Puts Online 1600 Great Works of Modern Art from 575 Artists

Free: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Guggenheim Offer 474 Free Art Books Online

Download Over 300+ Free Art Books From the Getty Museum

The History of Modern Art Visualized in a Massive 130-Foot Timeline

Art Critic Robert Hughes Demystifies Modern Art in The Shock of the New

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Faceboo k.

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Joseph Priestley Visualizes History & Great Historical Figures with Two of the Most Influential Infographics Ever (1769)

in Design, History | July 27th, 2016

Not a day now goes by without the appearance of new infographics, each of them meant to bring its viewers a fuller understanding of a subject or phenomenon (or convince them of an argument) at a glance. Modern technology has made it possible for us to see, as well as create, a wider variety of infographics filled with more data than ever, but their creation as an artistic and intellectual pursuit began longer ago than you might think. Here we have two handmade infographics by the 18th-century English polymath Joseph Priestley, notable not just for their earliness, but for the fact that they remain among the most impressive examples of the form.

Priestley’s 1769 A New Chart of History appears at the top of the post (click for larger version or see this one too). Accompanied by a description and subtitles, “A View of the Principal Revolutions of Empire that have taken place in the World” literally illustrates its creator’s view, unconventional at the time, that to truly understand history requires more than just examining the history of one country or one people. It requires examining the history of all the civilizations of Earth, which he divided into Scandinavia, Poland, Russia, Great Britain, Spain, France, Italy, “Turkey in Europe” and “Turkey in Asia,” Germany, Persia, India, China, Africa, and America.

His earlier A Chart of Biography (1765), a piece of which appears just above, had visualized not the fortunes of empires but the fortunes of individuals, more than 2000 statesmen, warriors, divines, metaphysicians, mathematicians, physicians, poets, artists, orators, critics, historians, and antiquarians who lived between 1200 BC and his own day. “What makes this viz especially amazing,” says a presentation by Tableau Software on the five most influential data visualizations of all time, “is that we can still learn from it at the aggregate level when we combine it with the second part of his two-part visualization” — the New Chart of History.

“Together, they weave an intricate story. They explain and document both the rise and fall of empires, and the unique thinkers that defined those nations,” the leading lights of the Greeks, the Romans, the Enlightenment, and other civilizations and periods besides. They make history, at least as Priestley and his students knew it, quickly graspable at a combination of scales seldom considered before, and one which has influenced thinking ever since about how civilizations grow, collapse, expand, and collide. After their initial publication, the Chart of Biography and New Chart of History met with great acclaim and decades of popular demand, and they still read as not just historical, geographical, and political, but somehow poetic — poetic in the manner, specifically, of Shelly’s Ozymandias.

You can read more about both charts at MIT’s Digital Humanities site.

10 Million Years of Evolution Visualized in an Elegant, 5‑Foot Long Infographic from 1931

6,000 Years of History Visualized in a 23-Foot-Long Timeline of World History, Created in 1871

4000 Years of History Displayed in a 5‑Foot-Long “Histomap” (Early Infographic) From 1931

5‑Minute Animation Maps 2,600 Years of Western Cultural History

The History of Philosophy, from 600 B.C.E. to 1935, Visualized in Two Massive, 44-Foot High Diagrams

The Tree of Languages Illustrated in a Big, Beautiful Infographic

Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. He’s at work on a book about Los Angeles, A Los Angeles Primer, the video series The City in Cinema, the crowdfunded journalism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Angeles Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.

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An Eye-Popping Collection of 400+ Japanese Matchbox Covers: From 1920 through the 1940s

in Art, Design, Life, Travel | July 1st, 2016

Phillumeny — the practice of collecting matchboxes — strikes me as a fun and practical hobby. As a child, I was fascinated with the contents of a large glass vase my grandparents had dedicated to this pursuit. Their collection was an ersatz record of all the hotels and nightclubs they had apparently visited before transforming into a dowdy older couple who enjoyed rocking in matching Bicentennial themed chairs, monitoring their bird feeder.

As any serious phillumenist will tell you, one need not have a personal connection to the items one is collecting. Most matchbox enthusiasts are in it for the art, a microcosm of 20th century design. The urge to preserve these disposable items is understandable, given the amount of artistry that went into them. It was good business practice for bars and restaurants to give them to customers at no charge, even if they never planned to strike so much as a single match.

Smoking’s heyday is over, but until someone figures out how to make fire with a smart phone, matchboxes and books are unlikely to disappear. Wherever you go, you’ll be able to find goodies to add to your collection, usually for free.

Or you could stay at home, trawling the Internet for some of the most glorious, and sought after examples of the form — those produced in Japan between the two World Wars. As author Steven Heller, co-chair of the School of Visual Arts’ MFA Design program, writes in Print magazine:

The designers were seriously influenced by imported European styles such as Victorian and Art Nouveau… (and later by Art Deco and the Bauhaus, introduced through Japanese graphic arts trade magazines, and incorporated into the design of matchbox labels during the late 1920s and ’30s). Western graphic mannerisms were harmoniously combined with traditional Japanese styles and geometries from the Meiji period (1868–1912), exemplified by both their simple and complex ornamental compositions. Since matches were a big export industry, and the Japanese dominated the markets in the United States, Australia, England, France, and even India, matchbox design exhibited a hybrid typography that wed Western and Japanese styles into an intricate mélange.

Find something that catches your eye? It shouldn’t cost more than a buck or two to acquire it, though Japanese clutter-control guru, Marie Kondo, would no doubt encourage you to adopt cartoonist Roz Chast’s approach to matchbook appreciation.

Earlier this spring, Chast shared her passion with readers of The New Yorker, collaging some of her favorites into an autobiographical comic wherein she revealed that she doesn’t collect the actual objects, just the digital images. Those familiar with Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant, Chast’s hilariously painful memoir about her difficult, aging parents’ “golden years,” will be unsurprised that she opted not to add to the unwelcome pile of “crap” that gets handed down to the next generation when a collector passes away.

If you’re inspired to start a Chast-style collection, have a rummage through the large album of Japanese vintage matchbox covers that web designer, Jane McDevitt posted to Flickr, from which the images here are drawn.

Those 418 labels, culled from a friend’s grandfather’s collection are just the tip of McDevitt’s matchbox obsession. To date, she’s posted over 2050 covers from all around the world, with the bulk hailing from Eastern Europe in the 50s and 60s. You can visit her collection of 400+ Japanese matchbox covers here. And if you’re into this stuff, check out the Japanese book, Matchbox Label Collection 1920s-40s.

via coudal.com

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The Making of Japanese Handmade Paper: A Short Film Documents an 800-Year-Old Tradition

Ayun Halliday, author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine, will be reading from her travel memoir, No Touch Monkey! And Other Travel Lessons Learned Too Late at Indy Reads Books in downtown Indianapolis, Thursday, July 7. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Photographer Bill Cunningham (RIP) on Living La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

in Design, Life, Media, Photography | June 27th, 2016

New York City lost some of its charm this weekend, with the news that Bill Cunningham, the Times’ beloved, on-the-street fashion photographer, had passed away at the age of 87.

Much has been made over the fact that he was designated a living landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. It’s an honor he earned, hitting the streets daily in his usual mufti of khakis, sneakers, and bleu de travail cotton jacket to hunt his quarry by bicycle, but one could never accuse him of courting it.

His employer frequently sent him to cover the elite, but he had no interest in joining their ranks, despite his own growing celebrity. His “Evening Hours” column documented the dressed up doings on the “party circuit.” (This living New York landmark never shook his Boston accent, one of the chief delights of his weekly video series for the Times.) A recent installment suggests that shooting the likes of actress Nicole Kidman and Vogue Editor-in-Chief Anna Wintour during tony private functions at MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“aht”) was far less exciting than encountering colorfully clad Himalayan dancers and a children’s craft table at an entirely free Sunday afternoon street fair sponsored by the Rubin Museum of Art.

Playwright Winter Miller shared this anecdote the morning Cunningham’s death was announced:

…he didn’t give a fk about who was famous or not. I once met Bill Murray in the lobby of the old New York Times building. He’d shown up to see if he could track down a photo of him and his then-wife that Bill had shot. I brought one Bill to the other, but Bill (Cunningham) was out on the streets with his blue jacket, white bike and camera. When he returned, I explained how I’d come to take Bill Murray under my wing to help him track down this photo. Bill had no idea who Bill Murray was and not unkindly told me (that) none of his photos were digital, so it would involve him personally digging through old files and he didn’t have time. I admired that he knew his priorities and never strayed from his task. I had been eager to get Bill Murray the thing he’d wanted and would have combed though vast files myself… but I never looked. Bill Cunningham’s files were impenetrable to an outsider.

One likes to think that Murray, who’s known for using his fame as his ticket to hang with ordinary mortals, would find much to love about that.

In fact, Murray strikes me as the perfect candidate to play Cunningham in a biopic covering the six decades spent living and working in a studio over Carnegie Hall. As far as I know, Bill Cunningham New York, a feature length documentary, is the only time his story has been captured on the silver screen. How can it be that no one has thought to make a movie centered on the lost bohemian period Cunningham recalls so fondly in the slideshow above? It sounds like an American spin on the Lost Generation—sneaking down to the unlocked stage for photographer Editta Sherman’s impromptu amateur performances of The Dying Swan, an elderly circus performer and her dog roaming the halls on a unicycle, someone always in a state of undress…

Perhaps Murray’s frequent collaborator, Wes Anderson, could be enlisted to set these wheels in motion. The colorful cast of characters seem tailor-made for this director, already a fashion world favorite.

The hats alone!

Prior to acquiring an Olympus Pen D half-frame camera from a friend in 1966, Cunningham worked as a milliner. Marilyn Monroe used to crack herself up, trying them on in between classes at the Actor’s Studio. The wife of a Carnegie Hall neighbor and Cunningham’s boss, fashion photographer Ray Solowinski, served as his model. After he was established as a fashion expert in his own right, Cunningham admitted that his designs were “a little too exotic – you know, for normal people”.

I think they’re wonderful, and hopefully, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson and you will agree. See below. I think they’re wonderful, and hopefully, Bill Murray, Wes Anderson and you will agree. Hats off to the inimitable Bill Cunningham, as much a fixture of New York as Carnegie Hall.

Alfred Stieglitz: The Eloquent Eye, a Revealing Look at “The Father of Modern Photography”

Stanley Kubrick’s Jazz Photography and The Film He Almost Made About Jazz Under Nazi Rule

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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Al Jaffee, the Longest Working Cartoonist in History, Shows How He Invented the Iconic “Folds-Ins” for Mad Magazine

in Comedy, Comics/Cartoons, Design, Magazines, Politics | May 9th, 2016

Keep copying those Sunday funnies, kids, and one day you may beat Al Jaffee’s record to become the Longest Working Cartoonist in History.

You’ll need to take extra good care of your health, given that the Guinness Book of World Records notified Jaffee, above, of his honorific on his 95th birthday.

Much of his legendary career has been spent at Mad Magazine, where he is best known as the father of Fold-ins.

Conceived of as the satirical inverse of the expensive-to-produce, 4‑color centerfolds that were a staple of glossier mags, the first Fold-In spoofed public perception of actress Elizabeth Taylor as a man-eater. Jaffe had figured it as a one-issue gag, but editor Al Feldstein had other ideas, demanding an immediate follow up for the June 1964 issue.

Jaffe obliged with the Richard Nixon Fold-in, which set the tone for the other 450 he has hand rendered in subsequent issues.

For those who made it to adulthood without the singular pleasure of creasing Mad’s back cover, you can digitally fold-in a few samples using this nifty interactive feature, courtesy of The New York Times.

With all due respect, it’s not the same, just enough to give a feel for the thrill of drawing the outermost panel in to reveal the visual punchline lurking within the larger picture. The print edition demands precision folding on the reader’s part, if one is to get a satisfactory answer to the rhetorical text posed at the outset.

Jaffe must be even more precise in his calculations. In an interview with Sean Edgar of Paste Magazine, he described how he turned a Republican primary stage shared by Nelson Rockefeller and Barry Goldwater into a surprise portrait of the man who would become president five years hence:

The first thing I did was draw Richard Nixon’s face, not in great detail, just a very rough establishment of where the eyes, nose and mouth would be, and the general shape. I did an exaggerated caricature of Nixon and then I cut it in half, and moved it apart. Once the face was cut in half, it didn’t have the integrity of a face anymore — it was sort of a half of face. Then I looked at what the eyes were like, and I said, ‘what can I make out of the eyes?’ He had these heavy eyebrows. I played around with many things, but I had to keep in mind all the time what the big picture was. So there they (Goldwater and Rockefeller) were up on a stage somewhere, doing a debate, and I thought, ‘What kind of stage prop can I put alongside these guys that would seem natural there?’ I decided that I could make eyes out of the lamps, and as far as the nose was concerned, that could come out of the figures — their clothing. Then I figured the mouth; I could use some sort of table that could give me those two sides. That’s how it all came about. You have to have some kind of visual imagination to see the possibilities. I had to concentrate on stuff that looked natural on a stage.

Each Fold-In is a reflection of the zeitgeist. Past preoccupations have included Vietnam, feminism, illegal drug use and, more recently, the Jersey Shore.

via Gothamist

Watch Mad Magazine’s Edgy, Never-Aired TV Special (1974)

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Cartoonists Draw Their Famous Cartoon Characters While Blindfolded (1947)

Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. Follow her @AyunHalliday

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75 Years of CIA Maps Now Declassified & Made Available Online

Meet the Memphis Group, the Bob Dylan-Inspired Designers of David Bowie’s Favorite Furniture

W.E.B. Du Bois Creates Revolutionary, Artistic Data Visualizations Showing the Economic Plight of African-Americans (1900)

Every Exhibition Held at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) Presented in a New Web Site: 1929 to Present

Joseph Priestley Visualizes History & Great Historical Figures with Two of the Most Influential Infographics Ever (1769)

An Eye-Popping Collection of 400+ Japanese Matchbox Covers: From 1920 through the 1940s

Photographer Bill Cunningham (RIP) on Living La Vie Boheme Above Carnegie Hall

Al Jaffee, the Longest Working Cartoonist in History, Shows How He Invented the Iconic “Folds-Ins” for Mad Magazine

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