ATTENTION/DISTRACTION
PHOTOGRAPHY IN ILLUSTRATED MAGAZINES, 1910-1970
Book Launch and Conference
Friday, December 5, 2025
1:30 pm-7:00 pm
Roosevelt House Public Policy Institute at Hunter College
47-49 East 65th Street, New York, NY 10065
Free and open to the public. To RSVP click here.
Organized by: Antonella Pelizzari and Andrés Zervigón
Program:
1:30-2:00: Introduction
2:00-4:00: Session
Daniel H. Magilow, Lindsay Young Professor of German, University of Tennessee, Knoxville: The Spectacular and The Banal: On the National Socialists’ Illustrierter Beobachter
Jordana Mendelson, Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University: Wartime (Photographic) Management: What Spain’s Civil War Photo Albums Tell Us About Uses of the Illustrated Press
Tsitsi Jaji, Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry, Duke University: Afro-Sheen: Picturing Black Women in Bingo, Ebony, Zonk!, and Drum Magazines
Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, UC Irvine: To Color or not to Color? Political, Economic and Demographic Factors in U.S. Mass Media’s early Turn to Polychromy
4:00-4:30: Coffee Break
4:30-5:30: Roundtable with presenters and Noelle Théard, Photo Editor, The New Yorker, and Myles Little, Former Photo Editor, TIME
5:30-7:00: Book signing and refreshments
Abstracts:
Daniel H. Magilow
Lindsay Young Professor of German, University of Tennessee, Knoxville
The Spectacular and The Banal: On the National Socialists’ Illustrierter Beobachter
In the wake of the Second World War and the Holocaust, scholarship on German illustrated magazines (Illustrierten) during the Third Reich understandably centers on their explicitly propagandistic character. And indeed, the official illustrated title of the National Socialist German Workers Party (NSDAP), the Illustrierter Beobachter (IB), regularly published hagiographic cover portraits of Hitler and antisemitic photostories about purported Jewish conspiracies, as well as panoramic spreads that celebrated the party’s electoral achievements and the size of its rallies. Nevertheless, reducing the IB to mere propaganda does not adequately account for how it used photography in rhetorically impactful ways to establish the Nazis’ political legitimacy. Particularly after the NSDAP became Germany’s second largest political party after 1930, the IB embedded its explicit photographic expressions of radical right-wing ideology within the familiar and less explicitly political features of the illustrated press, including jokes, cartoons, puzzles, serialized novels, and travel stories, all packaged in a tabloid format suitable for quick subway reading. This strategy of narrativizing spectacular imagery among the banal was typical of popular Illustrierten across the political spectrum. The IB effectively mobilized these modernist strategies of narrative disruption and avant-garde photographic experimentation typically associated with Germany’s leading mainstream weeklies such as the Berliner Illustrirte Zeitung and the Münchner Illustrierte Presse. Such similarities challenge us to view National Socialist visual culture as emerging from—rather than breaking with—the traditions and practices of interwar Illustrierten.
Jordana Mendelson
Associate Professor, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, New York University
Wartime (Photographic) Management: What Spain’s Civil War Photo Albums Tell Us About Uses of the Illustrated Press
This presentation explores two objects that were born in/because of the Spanish Civil war: photo albums used by the Catalan government’s Comissariat de Propaganda to produce its illustrated materials and an album-like object created through an accumulation of pages collected in folders, upon which were placed hundreds of photographs cut out from the press, pulled from identity cards, and other photographic sources. My presentation examines the wartime contexts for these albums, their relation to wartime illustrated press and considers the problem of cross-contamination across printed photographic media: How do the different organizational logics to which photographs are subjected impact how (and if) we can read complex printed and collected objects that are at once over- and under-determined because of their placement within larger administrative archives? How does violence carry across these different media forms, and what role do we have as interpreters of these objects to document and retrieve the violence embedded in the material itself, which support these photographic forms?
Tsitsi Jaji
Helen L. Bevington Associate Professor of Modern Poetry, Duke University
Afro-Sheen: Picturing Black Women in Bingo, Ebony, Zonk!, and Drum Magazines.
The cover of Print Matters features an image from Bingo, founded in Dakar and Paris in 1953. We see a Bingo cover girl looking at an earlier issue that also featured her, at a much younger age, looking at a cover of the magazine, Bingo. It highlights how magazine photography amplifies the pleasure of print media. For Black women in the post-1945 moment, holding a magazine that featured positive images was a new visual and tactile pleasure, what I call Afro-sheen. Product placement at its best! This iconic image is in fact a recurring trope that pictured Black women as both subject and object of a pleasurable Black gaze. Illustrated magazines aimed at Black readers in Africa and the United States produced a mutually legible grammar of transnational Black womanhood. Affinities appeared before the readers’ very eyes as magazines deployed photography to capture new ways to contradict anti-Black racist representation on both sides of the Atlantic. Ebony (first published in U.S. in 1945) Zonk! African People’s Pictorial (South Africa, 1949), Drum (South Africa, 1951) and Bingo: L’illustré africain (Paris and Dakar, 1953) frequently featured women as illustrations of the savvy, international and social-economic outlook they espoused. Whether the page featured one’s very self, or a movie star from across an ocean, the Black look was a way for women engage with transnational affiliations made possible by magazine photographs.
Sally Stein
Professor Emerita, UC Irvine
To Color or not to Color? Political, Economic and Demographic Factors in U.S. Mass Media’s early Turn to Polychromy
Stein’s talk will start by noting the way some of the most familiar photographic imagery may block our understanding of the color wave in 30s U.S. media. It contrasts some famous photographs with a less well-known painted mural of a newsstand before turning to consider political and economic sources to better comprehend how and arguably why following WWI the U.S. surpassed older and traditionally more colorful European color applications in mass consumption fueled by mass media.
Bios:
Daniel H. Magilow is Lindsay Young Professor of German at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and Co-Editor-in-Chief of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, the academic journal of the Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. His teaching and research center on photography and film and their intersections with Holocaust Studies, Weimar Germany, Nazi Germany, and postwar memory. Alongside many articles, book chapters, and book reviews, he is the author, co-author, editor, or translator of six books, including Holocaust Representations in History: An Introduction (Bloomsbury) and most recently, The Absolute Realist: Collected Writings of Albert Renger-Patzsch, 1923–1967 (Getty Publications). His research has been supported by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, the Blavatnik Archive, the Getty Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Service, and the National Endowment for the Humanities. He is currently working on a monograph about the National Socialists’ official photographically illustrated magazine, the Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer).
Jordana Mendelson is Associate Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at New York University, where she also directs the university’s “Espacio de Culturas,” a center that is dedicated to developing events and programs related to Spain, the Iberian Peninsula, and the Americas. Her research focuses on visual, exhibition, and print culture in 1930s Spain. She is the author of Documenting Spain: Artists, Exhibition Culture and the Modern Nation, 1929-1939 (Penn State UP, 2005), co-editor of Postcards: Ephemeral Histories of Modernity (Penn State UP, 2010), and curator or co-curator of Magazines and War 1936-1939 (Madrid, Reina Sofía Museum, 2007), Encounters with the 1930s (Madrid, Reina Sofía Museum, 2013), and Miró ADLAN (Barcelona, Fundació Miró, 2021). She co-edits the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. She is currently working on a. book manuscript tentatively called “Paper Routes: Designing and Administrating Modernity in 1930s Spain.”
Tsitsi Jaji teaches at Duke University in the departments of English and African & African American Studies (AAAS). She is the author of Africa in Stereo: Music, Modernism and Pan-African Solidarity, and two poetry volumes, Mother Tongues (Cave Canem award, 2018) and Beating the Graves.
Dr. Sally Stein, Professor Emerita, UC Irvine, has long studied photographic topics in relation to broader questions of culture and society. She has published extensively on FSA photography as well as the contested image of FDR, and in 2020 she culminated many decades of research and essays on Dorothea Lange with a revisionist monograph on Lange’s famed Migrant Mother. Her most recent volume offers a selection of her photo history essays from the late 1970s to the present, Close-ups from Afar (MACK, 2025).
Noelle Théard has been senior photo editor at The New Yorker since 2021. She is the producer for Photo Booth, the magazine’s photography column. Noelle was the program officer at Magnum Foundation from 2016 to 2021, and is a co-founder of FotoKonbit, a nonprofit organization created in 2010 to engage and support Haitians telling their own stories through photography.
Myles Little received a BFA in Photography from SCAD, and a PhD in art history and a Visual Studies Graduate Certificate from the University of Southern California. His dissertation considers documentary photography, electrical failure, and invisibility in New York City between 1965 and 1985, a time in which the medium’s truth claims were questioned as never before. He has curated photography exhibitions which have travelled around the world, and has taught the history of photography at Rutgers—New Brunswick and CUNY. Before entering graduate school, he commissioned photography as Senior Photo Editor of Time magazine.
Maria Antonella Pelizzari is Professor of the History of Photography in the Department at Hunter College and is doctoral faculty at The Graduate Center, CUNY. She has published on the subject of illustrated periodicals in Modernism/Modernity (2019), the Journal of Modern Italian Studies (2015), Bruno Munari. The Lightness of Art (Peter Lang, 2017); Magazines and Modern Identities(Bloomsbury, 2023), and has co-edited with Andrés Zérvigon Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910-1970 (2025). Her current book project is Distracting Fascism. Photography in Angelo Rizzoli’s Illustrated Periodicals (1927-1938). Pelizzari is the author of Photography and Italy (Reaktion, 2011) and co-editor of The Idea of Italy (YCBA 2022). She has worked curatorially at the Canadian Center for Architecture in Montréal (Traces of India: Photography, Architecture, and the Politics od Representation, 2003), and has served in the Hunter Curatorial Certificate (Peripheral Visions, 2012; Framing Community: Magnum Photos, 2017; 125th Street: Photography in Harlem, 2022).
Andrés Mario Zervigón is Professor of the History of Photography at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (USA), and Co-Editor in Chief of the journal History of Photography. He is author of John Heartfield and the Agitated Image (2012) and Photography and Germany (2017). With Tanya Sheehan he edited Photography and Its Origins (2014), with Sabine Kriebel Photography and Doubt (2017), with Donna Gustafson Subjective-Objective: A Century of Social Photography (2017) and with Antonella Pelizzari Print Matters: Media and Modernity in Illustrated Magazines, 1910-1970 (2025). His current book project is a history of Die Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung, for which he received a CASVA Senior Fellowship (2013-14). Zervigón leads The Developing Room, an academic working group at Rutgers devoted to photography studies. Since January 2025, he is coeditor of the journal History of Photography.
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