Mark Porter

A trip back to the 60s last night, at Anne Braybon’s talk on the fabulous Man About Town (later About Town, later Town) magazine.

I’ve always loved the great magazines of the 1960s. Because everything in those days was achieved in spite of the technology, there was a wonderful discipline to the thinking and layout which I’ve tried to revisit in every magazine I’ve ever done. You had to get it right then because it cost too much not to (even turning a headline on an angle was a rare luxury). When you wanted to try a new typeface (like the recently released Neue Haas Grotesk, soon to be renamed Helvetica) you had to go to Switzerland to buy it. It was simply too difficult to do the kind of decoration most magazines take for granted these days, and because of that the ideas shine through with incredible power. Twen and Nova get name-checked much more often, but Town, under art director Tom Wolsey, had a golden few years in which it set the template for an entire visual language. It had all the style and energy of the better-known magazines, and a unique – and very British – personality of its own.

The biggest revelation of Anne’s talk was the extent to which the iconic names of British photography in the 60s were discovered/encouraged/nurtured by Wolsey. The “terrible three” as Cecil Beaton called them — Donovan, Bailey, & Duffy — Norman Eales, John Deakin, Don McCullin, Philip Jones-Griffiths… The list of photographers who owe a debt to Wolsey is astounding. But although he loved and admired photographers, he also had that sense of what makes a page that all great art directors need. He was not afraid to choose the frames the photographers hadn’t noticed and (if necessary) fearlessly crop them to make them work in the magazine. He was to 60s London what Brodovitch was to 30s & 40s New York, and he has never had the credit he deserves.

If you’ve never seen a copy of Town, beg, borrow or steal to get one. Marvel at the virtuosity; despair at the brilliance; and then channel the energy. There’s so much there that it still gives off sparks!

My only problem with talks like this and Janet Froelich’s from a few weeks ago, is that they make me long to do a magazine again. So if there’s anybody out there with a magazine project on the go, please remember — I’m not just a newspaper guy, I do magazines too!