Photographic Magazines and Photo Magazines: Art Photography in British Magazines of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s

Abstract

This paper explores a type of photography magazine that specialized in promoting the art of photography. Their heyday was in the 1970s, when titles of this kind were published across Europe and North America. Until now, such magazines have been relatively underresearched by journalism scholars. The paper considers the innovative uses of photography by the British photographic magazine Creative Camera, relative to two nonphotographic magazines, Management Today and i-D. From 1968–80, Creative Camera championed an art of photography, which was vaguely defined by its editors as noncommercial in relation to mainstream styles of editorial and advertising photography. However, such specialist titles did not have a monopoly on artistic photography. Prominent nonspecialist magazines existed that encouraged innovation— albeit for profit. One of those was the London-based Management Today, which secured its niche in the 1970s through partnerships between its art director, Roland Schenk, and photographers such as Brian Griffin. Again in the 1980s, i-D nurtured a new breed of art school–trained photographers, such as Nick Knight, and shrewdly deployed their work to style itself as the maverick of fashion magazines. Subject specialists are right to identify small photography magazines as singular champions of the art of photography. But this overlooks the part played by larger magazines and the importance of a broader magazine culture.