Feature
Art and art direction – Kuchar Swara
The relationship between art directors and photography has developed in myriad ways alongside changes in fashion, taste and technology. Here we profile four very different practitioners: editorial designer Kuchar Swara, who collaborates regularly with photographers such as Nigel Shafran and Coppi Barbieri; Jens Gehlhaar (of directors’ collective Brand New School), who moves effortlessly between moving image campaigns, still photography and CGI; Thomas Lenthal, creative director for luxury fashion brands and his own magazine Paradis; and Daniel Eatock, whose approach to photography provides a provocative link between conceptual art and an objective, ‘vernacular’ approach to snapshot culture. All four have plenty to say about the place of photography and photographers in their working lives.
Scale and spirit
Optically sized fonts are the ‘slow food’ trend of typography, appreciated by a minority but with far-reaching influence
Megacity snapshots
India’s boom economy is shaking up the local communication industry like there’s no tomorrow
Messages from the city’s soul
For ten days in March, the billboards of Hobart were given over to the voices of its inhabitants
Bare bones of the revolution
Richard Pare’s photographs of Russian architecture strike up a dialogue with a time of energy and optimism.
Home Counties surrealism
Keef’s album covers are visual essays of their time, full of bleakness and possibility.
Buenos Aires project
Argentina’s dialogue with the European pioneers of postwar Modernism gave rise to a graphic design culture that remains fiercely contemporary
The world made visible
Motif, edited by Ruari McLean, was a quirky mix of art and illustration, with its roots in graphic art and typography
The floating signifier
Branding a nation may be just a matter of saying everything there is to say about nothing
Grab the hook
‘Musicians are cooler than normal people, even if they’re flakey and poor!’ – Chattanooga’s Young Monster