Eye Magazine

Typophoto is a book as tightly focused as its one-word title. Jessica Brier’s academic interest is in photography: here she describes the medium’s ‘reinvention’ in print media. She sees graphic design of the 1920s and 30s as a crucial part in this process and its methods as foundations of the profession’s practice today.

The first page of the introduction to Typophoto lets us know what a daunting but exhilarating book faces the reader. It is rare to find such terms as ‘communications industry’ and ‘visual literacy’ in histories of graphic design, nor are we likely to come across diagrams related to psychology in advertising or illustrated discussions of optical illusions. With such topics Brier lays the ground for a detailed account of the pioneers of modern graphic design in western Europe. She centres this on the New Typography and, in particular, the movement’s development of photomontage.