Off Topic

Okay, so I’ve never wanted to have one of those blogs where I ramble on about whatever happens to be flitting across my brainpan every few minutes, but I think I might start to occasionally break my own rules and put up some interesting things only tangentially related to photography. Particularly in weeks like this one where – aside from some commercial work – I’ve not actually taken any photos.

Anyway, who needs my pics when the real world is dealing up stuff like this:

Hopefully this won’t be the start of a slippery slope – but just in case, please feel free to come round and duff me up should I start posting in l33t speak and linking to Lasagna Cat. Oh.

Anyway, I’ve become a bit obsessed recently with Modernist typography and graphic design – for instance, the work of Abram Games, pictured here with the logo he designed for the BBC:

He’s probably best known for his wartime poster design, such as this striking image:

And also a series of less famous, but extremely interesting from a social history viewpoint, visions of what post-war Britain would become. (It’s intriguing that propaganda posters like this would encourage people to fight not for Britain, as such, but rather a vision of what Britain could be. No wonder Churchill was so unceremoniously dumped once the war ended.)

I suppose the point of all this is me trying to figure out why I’m so drawn to Modernism (despite being personally sympathetic to postmodernism...) and particularly the art and design of the 1920s-30s; part of the answer, I think, being the balance of form and function you see very clearly in Games’ posters. When I look through – for instance – books covering the history of photography, I can find lots of interest in the Victorian practitioners and pictorialism, but then I get to the mid-twenties, the Modernists come in, and – bang – everything just looks right suddenly. The best part of a century later this stuff still looks, well, modern.

It wasn’t just in art that there was this burst of early c20th creativity. The BBC ran a great series called Atom recently and, although I was aware of most of the content, I hadn’t realised how quickly things were moving in the first few decades of the c20th. We went from millennia of uncertainty about atoms even existing, to Rutherford opening up the sub-atomic world (here in Manchester, fact fans), to the foundations of Quantum Theory in just a few years. Has there ever been anything approaching this level of tumultuous change and discovery in any other period?

And, of course, all this was happening in a world that was teetering from war, to economic meltdown, to the rise of totalitarianism, and to war again. Look no further than the Bauhaus designed banknotes for the hyperinflationary failing Weimar State to see the ultimate example of modern, rational, beautiful design existing alongside a world in chaos. It maybe isn't a happy question to ask, but: does the one need the other?