Design Literacy: Understanding Graphic Design

across spreads and gatefolds. Juxtaposing unaltered and manipulated images
told the story of Stalin’s “glorious” régime and the progress that technology
and industry brought to the post-revolutionary Soviet Union. Gradually,
USSR in Constructionevolved a style of visual rhetoric characteristic of
socialist realism. Maxim Gorky introduced USSR in Construction, pushed
the boundaries of this genre, and became a paradigm of pictorial
propaganda later used in magazines published in fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany. Indeed many of his tropes—overlapping pictures, multiple
duotones on a spread, mortised inserts—have ultimately been used in
commercial catalogs and corporate annual reports. Maxim Gorky
introduced the concept of “romantic realism,” which addressed the idyllic
future of the state. But the magazine folded during the war years and
returned afterward in a smaller size and with more mundane layouts.
Photography is a uniquely viable medium (and inexhaustible art
form); as practiced in these pioneer picture magazines, the journalistic
photo essay is all but extinct (except in coffee-table art books). Despite the
attempts of such contemporary magazines as Double Takeand Blind Spot,
the photography magazine, that weekly window of news and views, is an
anomaly today.