Picture Newspaper 3
THE PICTURE NEWSPAPER. NEW YORK 1976. RICHARD BERNSTEIN, DIVINE, BILL CUNNINGHAM, UFO'S, PETROL PUMPS AND GAY NAKED MEN. WHAT'S NOT TO LIKE?
We adore
The Picture Newspaper!
Published in the mid-seventies in just three issues, of which this is the third. It was a newspaper of no words and only images. Huge images by the best photographers and designers working in New York at the time. The cover of this issue is by Richard Bernstein, airbrush illustrator of all our favourite issues of Interview Magazine. It was originally sold for $1 - not any more!
OK - It's Olympic week and we have medals to award. How about this Gold for best double page of the 1970s. Art directed by Oliviero Toscani, later a master of the juxtaposed image for Benetton. That filling station photo is right off the scale stunning.
And now the masterclass begins. A Disney Donald Duck frame in faded colours paired with a Sylvia Plachy photo taken at Lily Tomlin's birthday party of 1975. It's postmodernism with a twist; not just the mix of high and low cultures but of new and old. Respect is always due to old Hollywood.
The paper was published in two broadsheet sections. The cover of part two depicts Divine (with cleavage) as illustrated by John Matthews. The two-fold format will be familiar to IDEA Books afficionados: David Bowie borrowed it in entirety for his world beating
Isolar tour programmes. Bowie kept the size, the fold, the paper and the ink! It will go down as the best and most successful rip-off ever.
And a gold for Elsa Peretti of Tiffany for the best advert of (dare we say) all time? See it in its full page glory
here. Just her business card avec shadow on a glass top table. Oh so cool! For another amazing ad in this issue check this out - a
club/spaceship.
How good is this photograph by Chris Von Wangenheim? There is another almost unbelievable page in this particular issue. The link is
here. It might be the greatest single page of any magazine ever. It is surely a gay man who has inadvertantly found himself carrying a naked woman, isn't it?