Eye Magazine

From 1956 to 1998, FotoRamblas was a photography studio on Barcelona’s main pedestrian boulevard, the forever hip and happening Las Ramblas, writes Liz Farrelly.

The Design Museum is hosting an Alan Aldridge retrospective, writes Roger Sabin. ‘Just go along to the private view,’ chirps the editor, ‘and blog a few hundred words about your first impressions.’ Hmmm.

OK, maybe it’s not a classic cover. But the 40th anniversary issue of New York Magazine has all the other ingredients that non-New Yorkers expect from (and value in) the title: meaty, readable features, effective use of illustration, funny and revealing info-graphics and great photography, such as these punchy portraits (below) of New York actors (‘They’re here, they walk among us’) by Dan Winters. Other subjects include Meryl Streep, Tim Robbins and Robert De Niro. Of course.

I had no idea until a friend mentioned it, writes Daoud Sarhandi. ‘Congratulations,’ he said, ‘the quotes look great.’ Quotes? What quotes? ‘Mexico 1968. In the museum … the Museo de Arte Moderno.’ And so Carolina Rivas and I went, with our daughter, into Mexico City to take a look at ‘Designing Mexico 1968: An Olympic Identity’. Although I hadn't revisited the subject since ‘This is Mexico … this is 1968’ was published in Eye 56 – or rather since I was forced to reply in Eye 59 to a critical letter written by Eduardo Terrazas and Beatrice Trueblood – I felt right at home among the artefacts and epoch in the museum.

If Andy Warhol had lived to see the proliferation of cheap, flat screens that makes an exhibition like ‘Andy Warhol: Other Voices, Other Rooms’ possible . . . well he would have been a very happy 80-year-old.

Insular, egocentric, tongue-tied – and over. Yet if there is more visual communication than ever before, why do educationists insist on lamenting graphic design’s imminent demise? Rick Poynor responds to some perplexing findings at the ‘New Views 2’ conference held at the London College of Communication. Read Rick’s Monitor article ‘It’s the end of graphic design as we know it’ in the latest issue of Eye, no. 69 vol. 18.

Top: Altar for the Temple of the Spirit (Sketch for the creation of an altar at the Institute of Kinetics) 1969-70 by Lev Nussberg and Natalia Prokuratov. Image courtesy of Jane Voorhees Zimmerli Art Museum, the State University of New Jersey.

British artist Leo Fitzmaurice [whose work you can see right now in Deptford High St., above and bottom] has created an aesthetic of what might be called ‘visible absence’, writes David Crowley, in the latest issue of Eye. 

In the early days of Eye, we ran an article about the New Horizons series of illustrated introductions to the arts, culture and science published by Thames & Hudson.

Guardian (and Observer) readers have been getting a daily dose of Martin O’Neill’s collages in the seven-part ‘How to write’ series of booklets.