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Rick Poynor
Recent Essays | Biography | About | Books | Other Essays | Public Speaking | Uncanny | Other Exhibitions | Contact

Archive: November 2012


Herbert Spencer and the Decisive Detail

 As a photographer, Herbert Spencer seemed to delight in unraveling the order he spent his days as a designer attempting to create. His most telling and memorable images, those that seem most fully his own, show a world in which things fall apart, signs of official communication fray into visual poetry, and ordinary people assert their presence by inscribing streets, buildings and land with unofficial messages and marks.

READ MORE | COMMENTS

Robert Brownjohn: Photos at Street Level

 Robert Brownjohn’s photographs of London street typography, published in Typographica magazine in 1961, have become the stuff of design legend. Brownjohn claims in his introduction to “Street Level,” a 32-page visual essay, that the pictures were gathered on a single trip around the city. Now the Victoria and Albert Museum in London has acquired the photographs and put 18 pictures on display for the first time.

READ MORE | COMMENTS
Rick Poynor is a writer, critic, lecturer and curator, specialising in design, media and visual culture. He founded Eye, co-founded Design Observer, and contributes columns to Eye and Print. His latest book is Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design.


Recent Book


Uncanny Surrealism and Graphic Design
Uncanny: Surrealism and Graphic Design
Rick Poynor
Moravian Gallery, 2010
More books by Rick Poynor >>


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BLOGROLL


Ballardian
Bldgblog (Geoff Manaugh)
Book Works
David Byrne
Centre for the Study of Surrealism and its Legacies
Click Opera (Momus)
Creative Review
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21C The Future is Here
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Wellcome Collection

RICK POYNOR: RECOMMENDED BOOKS


Shoot! Existential Photography
Clément Chéroux, editor

Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change
Philip Brookman

What is Contemporary Art?
e-flux Journal

Iaspis Forum on Design and Critical Practice: The Reader
Martin Frostner & Magnus Ericson et al., editors

Volume: Writings on Graphic Design, Music, Art, and Culture
Kenneth FitzGerald & Rudy VanderLans

Song and Circumstance: The Work of David Byrne from Talking Heads to the Present
Sytze Steenstra

Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?
Mark Fisher

No Return: Journeys in the Holocaust
Romek Marber

Turning Pages: Editorial Design for Print Media
Robert Klanten et al., editors

Remainder
Tom McCarthy

RICK POYNOR: OTHER RECOMMENDATIONS


Inside Job
Charles Ferguson

Blow Out
Brian De Palma

Songs from the Second Floor
Roy Andersson

Red Desert
Michelangelo Antonioni

MisinforMation
COI/Mordant Music

Ace in the Hole
Billy Wilder

The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema
Slavoj Žižek