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special report special report
Mercifully for readers and staff, with Vol. 2, No. 10 the editors (or
maybe Warhol himself) switched to a handwritten version that
read Andy Warhol’s Interview, and it has more or less remained
there on the cover ever since. Soon after I left, of course, Interview
became a herald of late twentieth-century celebrity, glitz and
fashion, as well as a significant outlet for photography and graphic
design. It is so iconic that a few years ago an ambitious, limited-
edition, seven-volume, thirty-five-year anniversary collection, Andy
Warhol’s Interview: The Crystal Ball of Pop Culture, edited by
Sandra J. Brant and Ingrid Sischy, was published by Karl Lagerfeld’s
7L, Steidl Publishers. This mammoth boxed set only covered the first
decade, from 1969 to 1979.
Interview evolved into “the definitive guide to the most significant stars of today
and tomorrow,” say the reprint’s editors, and it was the first magazine to employ
a unique question-and-answer format to delve candidly into the minds of
celebrities, artists, politicians, filmmakers, musicians and literary figures. In many
of the issues, celebrities interview other celebrities, which was a Warholian
conceit that gave Interview its deliciously voyeuristic appeal. Yet it is the visual
persona, beginning with the haphazard original design, the pseudo-Deco
redesign that I perpetrated and ultimately the introduction of mannered
photo-illustration celebrity portrait covers by Richard Bernstein (1939–2002)
that defined Interview’s graphic personality during the disco decade.
Indeed, the latter marked a truly unique approach to editorial cover design.
Bernstein’s covers owed much to Sixties fashion illustration; his
heavily retouched photographs with paint, pencil and pastel
monumentalised subjects like nothing else in print. He exaggerated
their already glamorous visages through colourful graphic
enhancements that made each personality into a veritable
mask that hid blemishes while accentuating their auras. He made
“Superstars” into “Megastars” (which was also the title of his book
of collected Interview covers)—fifteen minutes became weeks,
months and years.
The most memorable issue that I worked on was devoted to Luciano Visconti’s
film version of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice (Vol. 2, No. 4), and was filled with
stunning film stills of Dirk Bogarde, Silvana Mangano and Björn Andrésen. It was
a startling issue, one of the last Interviews to use ‘handout’ or publicity photos.
Interview gradually shifted from publicity stock to its own photo sessions with
the eminences of celebrity and fashion photography—Robert Mapplethorpe,
Barry McKinley, Francesco Scavullo, Herb Ritts, Ara Gallant, Peter Beard, Bruce
Weber, Berry Berenson Perkins. These and others were given the freedom to
create original work. Despite the continued use of yellowing newsprint, these
photographs jumped off the pages.
Typographically, that first decade of Interview was comparatively
staid. Compared to, say, Fred Woodward’s Rolling Stone of the
same period, which expressed its typographic exuberance in so
many ways, Interview’s interior format was fairly neutral, allowing
the photographs to take centre stage. It wasn’t until the Nineties,
when Fabien Baron and later Tibor Kalman grabbed the design reins,
that the magazine’s graphic attributes formed a dynamic fusion.
During the Seventies, Interview was still uncertain whether it should
Centre
hold to its avant-garde, alternative-culture persona or march from
Interview September 1983,
the underground into the fashionable mainstream. Of course, with
spread featuring Close-Ups,
Ingrid Sischy at the helm starting in 1990, after Warhol’s demise in
featuring Susan Sarandon
photographed by Jean
1987, the magazine became more art, culture and fashion-oriented,
Pagliuso (left) and Brooke and decidedly establishment with its chic/new wave sensibility. She
Shields photographed by
brought in Kalman as creative director and designer, with whom
Albert Watson (right)
she had worked at Art Forum, and that’s when the die was cast.
Photography by
Although Interview has hit some rocks in the road of relevance along
Christoffer Rudquist the way, it continues to move—and groove.
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