Blog Archives
Advertising – Cigarettes
Instead of a cigarette, enjoy a small sampling from our chronological assortment of 1000’s cigarette ads, from the 1920’s till today, currently on display on the top shelf of the picture collection.
1920-1929
1930-1939
1940-1949
1950-1959
1960-1969
1970-1979
1980-1989
1990-1999
2000-2009
2010-2019
Scanlan’s Monthly
Scanlan’s Monthly
Volume One Number One (March 1970)
The tiny American flag and big six-figure check on the first-issue cover proclaim their audacity. No kneeling to sacred cows, least of all advertising.
Warren Hinckle came from Ramparts, which published Che Guevara, Fidel Castro and Eldridge Cleaver. Sidney Zion wrote for most of the New York publications you’ve heard of, and was the one who revealed the name of the guy who leaked the Pentagon Papers.
Together their monthly ran eight issues.
The first, in our rare periodicals archive, pretends ads don’t exist, favors the extended narrative, and pushes against journalistic hypocrisy. There’s a report offering Altamont as a refutation of Woodstock, an assertion of the normalcy of atrocity in Vietnam, a tale of CBS-CIA collusion in Haiti, the American- and British-made disaster of Biafra, Mark Twain’s radicality, high school activist thought, mobster biography, and a ski champ-turned-salesman profile by Hunter S. Thompson, whose gonzo paradigm, “The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved,” debuted in Scanlan’s third issue. Their last was boycotted by U.S. printers for covering domestic guerilla warfare.
“We will make no high-blown promises about how great this magazine is going to be,” Hinckle and Zion wrote on the cover. “Pay the buck and turn the page.”
Hunter S. Thompson, “The Temptations of Jean-Claude Killy”
Sol Stern, “Altamont: The Woodstock Nation’s Pearl Harbor”
Richard Severo, “The Lost Tribe of Alabama”
Ben Hecht, “The Unfinished Life of Mickey Cohen”
James D. Henry, “The Men of “B” Company”
Mark Libarle, “Another Generation Gap”
Joseph Kahn, “Dirty Kitchens of New York”
Maxwell Geismar, “Mark Twain and the Robber Barons”
Album
Album
February 1970-January 1971
(12 issues; missing #4 & #8)
Album was published in London from 1970 to 1971. Its editor was Bill Jay.
It was a magazine of photography’s incursions.
Every page is black and white. No ornament, austere blocks of text. The effect is like drawing a curtain, or dimming the lights in a theater, only without the direction dictated by film, leaving you free to wander.
There are no advertisements.
Its concern was the actuality of practice. Old essays followed new talents in a critical space where “art photography” was as ludicrous a term as “art painting,” and what appears easy and available as a technology is, like any artistic practice, much more fugitive and essential.
Duane Michals, Issue #7
Issue #1
from “On Being a Radical Photographer,” an interview with Blankfort, Issue #1
W. Eugene Smith, “Black Man’s Battleground,” Issue #2
from Issue #2
W. Eugene Smith, “Mailbox,” Ku Klux Klan series, Issue #2
from Press Cuttings, Issue #2
from Quotes, Issue #1
Gordon Bennett, “San Francisco,” Issue #11
from Opinions, Issue #1
Bill Brandt, “Friar’s Bay,” Issue #1
from Opinions, Issue #7
Manuel Alvarez Bravo, “Luz restrida,” Issue #9
from John Thomson’s “Illustrations of China and its People,” Issue #9
George N. Barnard, official photographer to Sherman’s Campaign, Issue #7
Harvey Himelfarb, from the Visual Dialogue Foundation portfolio, “Premonitions of a Tyranny of Culture,” Issue #10
Soviet Life
Soviet Life
May 1968-May 1981 (incomplete)
In 1956 the U.S. and Soviet governments agreed to a mutual propaganda plan modeled on Life. From them we got The USSR which became Soviet Life which became Russian Life. From us they got Amerika which became America Illustrated. “Soft” propaganda for a Cold War. Gentle cultural competition. Achievement, progress, beauty, tourism. Soviet Life could celebrate the cosmonauts and the construction of a dam as though ballistics and explosives were signs of society’s liberation. One can just imagine what Amerika looked like.
Somewhat relatedly, the U.S. Information Agency, which seems to have had a hand in all this, also employed Chermayeff & Geismar (which later added & Haviv) for a traveling Russian-language exhibition that showcased American design. Featured among the designer portraits, which can be found in the Milton Glaser Archives, was none other than Milton Glaser.
Find Soviet Life bound in green in the back near the bathrooms.
Intercosmos: Orbits of Cooperation, April 1981
Perhaps the Hardest Part is Waiting, April 1981
Kutaisi, This Wonderful Town, May 1981
The Festival for Everybody, May 1981
Marx and Lincoln, May 1968
Women Take Over Men’s Jobs, May 1981
What is Kreshchatik to the Man on the Street?, July 1968
Blast Saves a City, June 1968
SVA Library Picture & Periodicals Collections 