Complete collections of historic magazines are online. The internet offers access to collections of old magazines on a wide range of subjects, from modernist residential architecture to the complete Revista Realidade collection, including the legendary Camera Work. There is a whole world to discuss.
US Modernist: modernist architecture
The modernist residential architecture collection is available on US Modernist, a substantial database offering more than 6,000 magazines in digital format. Its vast holdings cover US magazines published since the 1920s, as well as some earlier titles. They range from well-known publications such as American Architect and Arts & Architecture to a series of regional and specialist titles. They are invaluable sources for learning not only about works by great architects such as Richard Neutra, but also about ways of living and transformations of domesticity throughout the twentieth century.
Camera Work: Alfred Stieglitz’s magazine
An unmissable collection is Camera Work, published between 1903 and 1917. It was the first publication devoted to photography as art. It was edited by photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, a pivotal figure in the history of technical images, with design by the equally important photographer and painter Edward Steichen, who would become the first director of MoMA’s photography department in New York in the 1950s.
Closely associated with the aesthetics of pictorialism—a photographic style whose techniques seek to bring photography closer to painting through various forms of treatment we would now call postproduction—the magazine changed its focus in its final issues. The turning point was the publication of the then-young photographer Paul Strand, a pioneer of pure or straight photography, virtually the opposite of pictorialism. This change of direction is considered the cause of the loss of subscribers that led the magazine to close in 1917.
Revista Realidade: where Andujar began
In Brazil, we have the Brasiliana collection at the Mindlin Library here at USP, which offers the public 170 different periodicals, and the National Library, which makes extensive collections of Brazilian magazines available to the public.
At the National Library, one can access everything from general-interest magazines such as Eu Sei Tudo, an almanac published monthly from 1917 to 1955, to journalistic publications that became important historical sources for their graphic design, editorial perspective, and contribution to photojournalism, such as O Cruzeiro, Revista Manchete, and Realidade, which transformed the Brazilian press with long-form reporting and ample space for the photographer and designer.
Just recall that the remarkable Claudia Andujar, whose work is on view at IMS here in São Paulo, had her career profoundly shaped by her experience at the magazine, where she worked from 1966 to 1971.
Image: Alfred Stieglitz. The Hand of Man. Camera Work, 1, 1903.
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