The US cultural revolution of photojournalism

NEW YORK - The power of images and the revolution in visual culture through photography and photojournalism. 'Modern Look: Photography and the American Magazine', at the Jewish Museum in New York from April 3 to July 11, 2021, explores how photography, graphic design and the most popular magazines have helped to change the perception of representation in the United States over the years 1930s to 1950s. These are the boom years of magazines such as Life, Look, Fortune, Harper's Bazaar or Vogue, at the forefront for the time in understanding that the power of photography as a new language and that it would soon replace the written word as a means to feed imagination. At the motto, a photo (or an image) is worth a thousand words, Modern Look presents over 150 works including vintage photos, art book layouts, magazine covers that left their mark at the time but still today they are part of the collective memory. Many of the authors of those shots were Jewish immigrants in the United States of Europe. Among these Erwin Blumenfeld, one of the best known fashion photographers, and the signature behind the historic covers of Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, Cosmopolitan. The exhibition is divided into five sections, 'Art as Design, Design as Art', 'Fashion as Desire', 'The Contested Page', 'Reimagining Industry' and 'Graphic Effect' with works by Richard Avedon, among others, Lillian Bassman, Lester Beall, Margaret Bourke-White, Louis Faurer, Robert Frank, William Klein, Herbert Matter, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks. In postwar America, moreover, magazines began to set aside purely aesthetic goals and began to touch upon issues such as racial, class, and social. The Contested Page section explores this very theme with works, for example, by Gordon Parks, the first African-American photographer hired by Vogue. Modern Look was organized by Mason Klein, curator of The Jewish Museum in collaboration with Leslie Gill, Ines Yupanqui, Yeliz Secerli and Clint Ross Coller.