Alexey Brodovitch
1940's to 1950's
Post by Melissa Mackie
"What Dom Perignon was to Champagne so (Brodovitch) has been to photographic design and editorial layout" trueman Capote
Alexey Brodovitch was a Russian born Photographer, designer and instructor who is most famous for his art direction of fashion magazine Harpers Bazaar from 1938 to 1958.
He played a crucial role in introducing to the united states a radically simplified "modern" graphic design style forged in Europe in the 1920's from an amalgam of Vanguard movement in art and design. Through his teaching, he created a generation of designers sympathetic to his beliefs in the primacy of visual freshness and immediacy. Fascinated with photography, he made it the backbone of modern magazine design, and he fostered the development of an expressionistic, almost primal style of picture taking that became the dominant style of photographic practice in the 1950's.
Brodovitch's key concept was to envision his layouts as single rectangles that spread over two pages instead of the narrow vertical column of a single page. His experimentation with bleed, photographs, cropping, illustrations, movement, montage, multiple imaging, scale, synthetic colour, type and white space serves as a catalog of how to formulate a desired meaning and control the readers visuls pacing of time.
Sadly, Brodovitch's personal life was less triumphant. Plagued by alcoholism, he left Bazaar in 1958 and eventually moved to the south of France, where he died in 1971.
MELISSA MACKIE :)
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