Leonardo

422 Leonardo Reviews technologies is a decisive contribution to our thinking on media. It is also an important aid to a broader understanding of the life and history of forms. On the one hand, the halftone technology can be linked to the art-historical figure of the “grid” and, more generally, to the long history of “pixeled images” (a history that starts long before the commercialization of the half-tone in the 1880s and which will not end with the contemporary digital technologies, even if they may give the illusion to be capable of superseding pixelation by extreme high resolution). On the other hand, the insistence on half-tone technology opens new ground to connect modern typographic design with the social and industrial context that actively supports it. For both New Typography and Phototypo, the role of publicity as well as artistic experience has been well studied, but Brier usefully insists on other functions of the foregrounding of half-tone, whose function was also to praise and promote the creative and central position of technology itself. Far from “hiding” the technological infrastructure of their verbo-visual messages, New Typography and Phototypo emphasized the material mediation of half-tone through very visible pixelation and the no less visual retouching of camera-based material, which thus “lost” its supposedly natural and inherent figurative function in order to “win” new and other communicative functions, graphic design thus being seen as a tool to “train” the eye to new types of communication. At the same time, the accentuation of the technological making of the verbo-visual composition was an ideological stance to accentuate the performative power of technology itself in a fast-changing and increasingly mechanized society. A paradoxical procedure, given the fact the creation of certain forms of opacity was supposed to be compatible with the ambition to produce clear and legible images; but other paradoxes were at work as well, such as the tension between a left-leaning spirit of the new graphic design and its involvement in the praise and defense of industrial conglomerates, or the supposedly absolute gap between functional and decorative elements. Brier’s book offers a new and often surprising interpretive framework of New Typography and Phototypo. It goes beyond the traditional interpretation that the new graphic design is based on new combinations of words and images: What the author shows is that from the point of view of halftone reproduction techniques, the very distinction between the verbal and the visual is blurred. The book further demonstrates the need to situate graphic design debates in a broader context, the most important umbrella terms being the grid as well as the belief in the performative power of modern technology. In addition, Brier rightly emphasizes the necessity of linking the new graphic design to strong but nevertheless rather vague ideas on “legibility” and “memorability” and contemporary scientific attempts to quantify (and thus mechanize) both reading procedures and human memory (one of the many forms taken by the dialogue between art and science in these years). This broader view finally allows challenging certain art-historical stereotypes, such as the antinomy between New Typography and Typophoto on the one hand and Surrealism and New Objectivity on the other hand: These movements are all part of the larger utopian spirit of the Weimar era. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to call this book a landmark publication. Theoretically as well as methodologically , it really breaks new ground. The close-reading of often less-known material is exemplary. The style is totally jargon free and a pleasure to read. And Brier’s study establishes many bridges between design and other areas (photography of course, but also history, politics, communication studies, and book history). One may think that New Typography– cum–Constructivist Photography scholarship is an overcrowded field, but this study proves that there is always room for great innovative research, solidly rooted in archival research and with a strong eye for the material properties of the work under scrutiny. By the Bedside of the Patient: Lessons for the Twenty-First Century Physician by Nortin M. Hadler, M.D. University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, NC, USA. 2016. 204 pp. ISBN 978...