BOOK REVIEWS — Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910-1970.

Maria Antonella Pelizzari (Editor) and Andrés Mario Zervigón (Editor), Getty Publications, 2025.

Print Matters takes readers on a (mostly) global tour through the early- and mid-twentieth-century popular photo-illustrated magazine. It aims to show that the production, distribution, use, and reception of these photo-magazines cannot be understood outside of their larger modern “media ecosystem”—a blurry, international, cross-influential network of formats, technologies, organizations, and individuals. And yet, the photo-magazine genre played a unique role within this visual culture, the book argues. The dynamic and adaptable new ways in which the format could mediate text and image worked to reflect as well as shape readers’ realities.

Begun as a New York Public Library workshop of the same name almost a decade before, this edited volume comprises seventeen essays replete with illustrations. Most are of rarely (or never) shown publication pages and covers, as well as dummy layouts and other images of production processes—incredibly ephemeral material that has been lucky enough to be kept or found and then preserved and made discoverable to researchers by archivists, collectors, and other memory workers. The book’s interdisciplinary contributors—many of whom participated in the initial workshop—hail from primarily U.S. and Canadian universities and include leading scholars in the fields of photography history and print culture, such as Nadya Bair, Thierry Gervais, and Sally Stein.

The work is organized into four parts, which the editors see as major themes of the newly developing “mediascapes” in which photo-magazines were embedded during, between, and after the world wars. Each part has three to five chapters that present a different facet of that part’s theme. Part 1 defines the genre of the photo-magazine and the technology that made it possible, but also its fluid relationship to adjacent print genres and examples of its aesthetic as well as ideologic malleability. Part 2 focuses on the photographs themselves and how relationships among photographers, agencies, editors, distributors, and other media platforms could control magazine content but also multiply and reinforce messaging. Part 3 provides examples of “cross-fertilization,” ideological shift, and community building within and across national and international magazines and their readers. Part 4, called “Propelling Modernity,” is ostensibly about how modern magazines—especially in their choice to use color photography or not—could be deployed for differing ideological ends. But, being the final section of the book, it also aims to tie together the previous sections’ themes as well as include past and contemporary visions of the future. The section’s three chapters do manage to check all those boxes, albeit broadly. While the first two chapters are diverse national case studies, the third (and book-ending) chapter is an interview by the editors of a female photographer who started working for the post-WWII agency Magnum Photos in the late 1970s. Their discussion about her work methods and professional experiences, then and now, provides an important first-hand account and reflection of media’s past and present, and what might be yet to come.

Print Matters is one of two edited volumes recently published on the topic of modern illustrated magazines from a global perspective. Magazines and Modern Identities: Global Cultures of the Illustrated Press, 1880-1945, edited by Tim Satterthwaite and Andrew Thacker, was published by Bloomsbury in 2023. Although it too situates magazines in the broader “media ecosystem,” its chapters focus more on the magazine as it relates to currents of nationalism versus internationalism and tradition versus modernism as the world progressed from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The book starts and ends earlier in time than Print Matters and groups its essays geographically and roughly chronologically. Looking at mostly European and Anglo countries, such as the U.S., Canada, and Australia, it only examines a selection of other countries at the very end of the book—China, Turkish-speaking areas of the Soviet Union, and Mexico. But Print Matters is not a truly global history either. The book similarly spends a lot of time in Europe and the U.S. (though not Canada or Australia); Latin America is again underrepresented (perhaps surprising for a Getty Research Institute publication), and the Middle East is still not explored. Yet, it does delve deeper into Southeast Asia than the other volume and does not exclude Africa. Moreover, its images are all high-quality, full-color reproductions, unlike the all-black-and-white images of the other volume that diminish their visual understanding and, thereby, the editors’ and authors’ arguments.

Both books, however, make excellent contributions to the still understudied area of magazines, going beyond literary magazines and famous graphic designers to demonstrate the popular magazine’s active and reactive roles in the development of modern culture around the world. Print Matters, though, provides a richer multimedia view that makes a stronger case for the historical impact of magazines and visual culture in general.

Lauren McDaniel (she/her), MLIS, MA. Coordinator of Special Collections and Librarian for History and Art, Leatherby Libraries, Chapman University.