Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910–1970

Available November 2025

Edited by Maria Antonella Pelizzari and Andrés Mario Zervigón

This volume presents a nuanced exploration of how illustrated magazines shaped global visual culture between 1910 and 1970.

In the early to mid-twentieth century, the vast majority of printed photographs appeared in the pages of illustrated magazines. Publications such as Life, China Pictorial, Drum, Picture Post, and Ebony did more than showcase photographs; they crafted visual narratives by combining images, text, and graphics into influential cultural artifacts. These periodicals shaped public perception and mass media consensus like the Internet does today, bringing a shared visual experience to homes and newsstands around the world.

The essays in this volume delve into the technologies and visual strategies behind these publications, showing how their layouts were affected by political, commercial, editorial, and artistic factors leading up to World War II. The commentaries also explore how democracy, dictatorships, colonization, and modernity at large gave rise to experimental magazine designs, turning avant-garde art and lifestyle reporting into popular formats. Featuring over 150 images, Print Matters traces how illustrated magazines evolved across countries and continents, offering new insights into their history and enduring impact on culture and society.

Maria Antonella Pelizzari is a professor of the history of photography in the Department of Art and Art History at Hunter College and the Graduate Center, the City University of New York. Andrés Mario Zervigón is a professor of the history of photography in the Department of Art History at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

“Print Matters is a brilliant collection of essays exploring how the illustrated magazine in the twentieth century became one of the key media for shaping the everyday experience of modernity for citizens around the world. The essays in this wonderfully illustrated volume demonstrate with panache how the amalgamation of photography, text, and graphic design in the many magazines that appeared in the last century both reflected and formed global forms of modernity. With essays skilfully analysing magazines from Europe and the United States to China, Vietnam, and South Africa, this is an essential volume for all those interested in modern print culture.”
—Professor Andrew Thacker, Department of English, Nottingham Trent University

“Print Matters makes an important contribution to the expanding field of periodical studies, with chapters on the magazines of Africa and Asia as well as Europe and North America. These studies intersect in fascinating ways, capturing the complex local and global dynamics shaping magazine cultures in a world increasingly dominated by visual media.”
—Tim Satterthwaite, Senior Lecturer, University of Brighton, and author of Modernist Magazines and the Social Ideal (2020)

“As the editor of VU once declared, photography was invented twice: first by Daguerre and Niépce and then, a century later, by the illustrated magazine. This wonderful volume investigates this second invention in fascinating detail, offering a global perspective on the development of a multilayered, multimedia vehicle in which the photographic image is combined with text and graphics to both celebrate and mediate the everyday experience of modernity. Featuring essays by a panoply of stellar scholars, this is a book that everyone must have on their shelf.”
—Geoffrey Batchen, Professor of History of Art, University of Oxford

352 pages
7 x 10 inches
111 color and 38 b/w illustrations
ISBN 979-8-88712-000-3
paperback

Getty Publications
Imprint: Getty Research Institute
Series: Issues & Debates

2025