Newsstand magazines. On paper.
I did a lot of work for print magazines over the past 30 years. I recently compiled five volumes of my favorite tearsheets. There are about 1,200 pages total in the five volumes, and I put them in chronological order. It makes a pretty good snapshot of my career.
It was the golden age of magazines. I was lucky to have done this work when I did, because many magazines that I worked with are now defunct or published online only — famous magazines such as Child, Parenting, Baby Talk, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, USA Weekend, American Health, Mademoiselle, McCall’s, Healthy Kids, Epoca (Italy), Life, Ladies Home Journal, Metropolitan Home and Smart Money. Gone!
I also worked with these magazines that are still on the newsstand: New York, Self, Glamour, Esquire, Fortune, Psychology Today, American Baby, Cosmopolitan, and more.
The books are a snapshot of an era, about child-rearing, the big issues of the day, and how graphics and art direction styles changed over the 30 year period. In 1985, when I started photographing babies, times were changing. My photos of babies were completely different from what had been the norm. They were unsentimental and free of adornment, focused on the personality of the baby itself rather than on adult projections… this shift in approach was all it took to make my photos popular with art directors, and I’m proud to have put a fresh face on the millennial generation.
Babies in pinstripe suits, and that typeface! Definitely 1988! These were McGraw Hill ads that appeared in the New York Times.
My all-time favorite cloth diaper photo in Metropolitan Home, 1989, and a Whittle publication, Special Report, of a toddler making a peace sign. (a shoot that took three redo castings, each call for a little older baby… now we know that they don’t make peace signs until they are 2 1/2)
I shot covers for Baby Talk and American Baby for a few years. I felt very lucky to be chosen for their cover photographer since they were competing magazines by different publishers.
This spread, American Baby on the left, and New York Magazine on the right, just happened to fall that way chronologically, but it works! Nathan Lane was intensely crazy to photograph — I don’t know why he put his fingers in his ears — the babies went home!
It was easier to get babies to play musical instruments than to get them to make a peace sign…This was for Similac, we rented a baby grand piano, violin, drums, trumpet, saxophone, xylophone, and we had a conductor. My mom made the outfits.
Linocolor gave me their high-end scanner to use, and they never wanted it back! It was the only time I ever asked a company for such a favor. On the opposite page, magazines would sometimes write about me. There I am with Anna, telling the story about the peace sign shoot.
Newsweek Japan often picked up U.S. Newsweek stories and I loved collecting those tearsheets.
