I am a fan of the magazine Typographica, edited by Herbert Spencer between 1949 and 1967 in two series. The second series was the inspiration for Eye magazine.

I ordered the first issue of the first series for an article by Charles Hale about image and text. In graphic design, it is pretty rare to find articles about images that are not about illustration or technical issues such as reproduction. In manuals, the ideas about composition using photos are few and generic. Compare this with the amount of vocabulary and rules about typographic composition.

The primary conceptual framework for dealing with the image is still semiotic theory, which tends to see images as if they were texts (with a “discourse” and a “rhetoric”). Design’s general approach focuses on the word and typographic composition. The image is either defined as subordinate to the text (illustration) or as an element of composition (content).

To see images functioning just as images is surprisingly rare in a field considered as visual. Herbert Spencer’s Typographica, despite its name, was a publication strikingly attuned to photography and non-illustrative images.