Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The development of picture magazines is a twentieth-century phenomenon, aided by print technologies that offered quality reproduction of photographs in large numbers and in a short time, like rotogravure, which had yielded high quality reproduction using a single plate for type and photo since 1910 (→  Magazine, History of ). Earlier, photographs had been used for wood-engraved illustrations in many magazines, including the Leipziger Illustrirte (Germany, 1843), L'Illustration (France, 1843 ), Illustrated London News (UK, 1842), L'Illustracion (Spain, 1849), th e Saturday Evening Post (USA, 1821) , Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper (USA, 1855), Harper's Weekly (USA, 1857), and the Weekly Illustrated of India (India, 1880). The Canadian Illustrated News (1869) featured a half-tone on its first cover, only a few years after the Illustrated London News (1842) had been launched with 32 woodcuts on 16 pages. Picture magazines constituted windows to the world for millions of readers in all parts of the world, who became eyewitnesses to human and natural tragedies, visitors to foreign places, and participants in the explorations of the universe. The heyday of modern picture magazines was the 1920s and 1930s, when they emerged – accompanied by the success of moving pictures – as important global manifestations of an expanding visual culture (→  Cinema ). Picture magazines ... log in or subscribe to read full text