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Dawoud Bey | 2017 MacArthur Fellow
Portfolio Events May Not Be Worth It For Established Photographers

6 Comments

  1. I love Helvetica. Have you seen Objectified, Hustwit’s latest film?

    My favorite quote from that: “I’d rather deal with a tyrant than a committee any day. Committees are there to spread blame, not take chances.”

    Tyrants vs Committees

  2. I’m sorry, my brain decided to take a break.

    The above quote is from Art & Copy, a great film on advertising and admen. Objectified is still great and full of lots of quotable tidbits.

  3. My previous life was in the graphic design field so I remember the ’90s being the era of the great “legibility” debate when people like David Carson and his surf livestyle magazine, and then Raygun, as well as Rudy Vanderlands and Zuzanna Licko from Emigre magazine, were breaking the rules and showing people that sometimes communication isn’t about legibility either. They were able to show that a lot of communication is what I call “predictive” in nature. Certain demographics expect a certain communication. Much like tagging and graffiti… it may not seem “legible” to everyone yet someone from an area where a lot of it exists might know exactly what’s being said with it. It’s all about vernacular and semantics and lexicon… the language of language. And photography has a language as well, even without words.

  4. I was an art director and designer too, and I always thought Emigre/Ray Gun were cool shit. But in the end I learned that you have to control the words and pictures because the content trumps all those fancy pants designer concerns.

    Thank God “Graphic Design” as an art form unto itself simply up and died back in the dot.com era ;-)

  5. […] A Photo Editor – Don’t Confuse Legibility With Communication […]

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