Photographer’s Spot

Time from olden and current times

I mentioned in the comments the other day that I first read an issue of Time magazine cover-to-cover when I was eleven years old, and that I felt very grown up and proud of the accomplishment for having done it. That happened in the summer of 1968. I ever remember where I was—in an upstairs bedroom at my Uncle Cam’s cottage on a wooded bluff high above Lake Michigan.

In later years I stopped reading Time because my impression was that it had gotten slighter and less serious. But of course I’ve changed over the years too—I’m older and more experienced and even slightly more educated now than I was when I was eleven. So had the magazine really changed, or had I? Or both?

To find out, I went on Ebay and bought an issue of Time from 1968—the January 19th, 1968 issue (the year after founder Henry Luce died)—and then I bought the current (February 8, 2010) issue from the newsstand. I didn’t read either one cover to cover this time, but I read enough to get a handle on them. The differences are fascinating.

The biggest difference is that the older issue has far more words in it. I’m not going to do a strict count, but old Time has about 100 pages (not all are paginated) and new Time has 56. Old Time is denser, too—although both have three-column layouts, new Time has far more “white space,” larger heads, more decorations and box-outs and such, and many much larger photographs. (See the “Problem With Football” spread at the bottom of this post for an example.) I would estimate that the older issue has at least three times and possibly as many as five times as many words in it.

A typical page spread from old Time is meaty and no-nonsense, but boring visually. Oh, and the paper they used in those days was yellower. Just kidding.

Old Time also offers a far more comprehensive coverage of the news. The sections, listed alphabetically, are: Art, Books, Business, Cinema, Education, Law, Letters, Medicine, Milestones, Modern Living, Music, Nation, People, Press, Religion, Science, Sport, Television, Theater, and World. Each of those categories has multiple articles within it, and even the shortest ones are brisk, informative, and to the point. In “Nation,” for example, both political parties get more than 1,000 words each, alongside much else.

This week’s issue seems surprisingly light on trifling pop-culture content compared to some recent issues I’ve seen, but the 1968 issue is undeniably a much more serious magazine, with a friendly but sober and distinctly adult tone. It’s easy to picture men in suits and ties and women in dresses reading it. The new issue in contrast opens with “10 Questions” put to “rocker” Ozzy Osbourne, wherein he speaks to such burning issues of the day as “Where do you get your awesome glasses?” and “What’s your favorite tatoo?” And near the end we get “Randy Jackson’s Short List,” in which the American Idol judge best known for calling people “dawg” holds forth on some of his favorite things, including his favorite movie and the architecture he likes. In between we get very good editorial content—just far less of it, in both breadth and depth, than there used to be. The tone in the new issue compared to the old seems slightly dumbed-down in the serious articles, and, in the frothier sections already mentioned, anxiously ditzy, like a youngish mother who thinks she’s hip trying to communicate with a surly teenager. Again in fairly stark contrast, old Time’s “People” section (which later spawned People magazine) only includes one individual who would qualify as a celebrity by contemporary definitions (Hollywood actress Faye Dunaway). The other people mentioned in 1968’s “People” include three politicians, two relatives of politicians, one estranged wife of a famous spy (those were still the Cold War years, remember) and one book author (Vladimir Nabokov). I’m not sure it’s an improvement.

The cover of the 1968 is classic Time: an original painting (it looks like chalk or pastels, I can’t tell) by one Boris Chaliapin, whose signature appears on the cover but who isn’t credited inside the book, or at least not that I could find. The Feb. 8 cover is a photograph of a squashed and dirty football, by photographer Stephen Lewis. He’s credited on the Contents page. (So is “prop stylist” Michele Faro, who apparently was charged with the responsibility of squashing and dirtying the football.) I personally have a genial loathing for “concept” covers like this one—I think they’re just weak—and I happen to know that current research suggests that covers with white backgrounds sell best, which makes all magazines with white covers seem cynical to me. But that’s just me. Old Time’s cover subject is a then-young Zubin Mehta, making the old cover simultaneously “diverse” (although that term wasn’t in common use then) and also solidly middlebrow; neither hip mothers nor recalcitrant teens give a rat’s patootie for classical music now, alas.

Perhaps the best illustration of the difference between old and new is the “Essay.” The essay from 1968 is a serious, intent piece about charitable foundations and their role in society. It runs to about 2,000 words and is not bylined. The essay in the most recent Time is an idle little footle about how neat birthdays can be*. It runs 600 words or so, and the author’s last name is by far the biggest type on the page. Wherefore art Lance Morrow?

The essay from the 1968 issue is to this week’s essay what a New York strip steak is to a rice cake lightly glazed with cinnamon. Today’s Time suggests that modern readers cannot cope with a single page of text, never mind two pages, unless it is enlivened with some sort of graphic—even if the informational content of the graphic is nearly zilch. Then again, in 1968, advertisements were never…well, pages of text.

The one area where new Time scores decisively over the old is photography. The older issue has only two color editorial features (although many of the ads are in color). One is a portfolio of paintings and the other is a picture story on deep-sea exploration in “Science.” For the most part, the older magazine’s photographs are almost all portraits, almost all in black-and-white, and almost all small (one column wide). The portraits vary in quality, but at least a few are pretty poor. The new issue is visually much stronger, with much better photographs generally and a higher standard even in the small stuff; there is also much more inventive use of visual accents and the graphic presentation of information.

As I mentioned, though, much of this visual dynamism comes at the expense of verbal content. White space, bold heads, graphs, inset pictures and the like all take up space—which the newer issue has far less of to start with.

And even with photography, the older issue scores one distinct hit. The big photo essay in the current issue features photographs by James Nachtwey on the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake. But there are only four pictures. Two of them are run far too large, as two-page spreads, and both of the spreads are pretty weak photographs, especially the first one—it actually makes less of an impact than it might have done if it were run smaller. To see what I mean, if you have the issue yourself, hold the spread on page 22–24 out flat at arm’s length in good light—see how it seems more cohesive that way than it did when you first encountered it turning the pages? The color feature on “Oceanology” in the “Science” section of the older issue has sixteen photographs, with a much more sensible, if less flashy, layout.

The photo feature in the old Time has sixteen pictures; the new, four.

In fact, in my opinion the weakest visual aspect of the new Time is the knee-jerk overuse of double-truck photos. There’s just no need to make them that big—in no case, in this issue at least, do they look better that way than they would smaller. The informational content just doesn’t justify the space. Big double-trucks are a standard and in my opinion uncreative way of going for “impact” and a “now” look. That’s the common wisdom, anyway. In reality it’s just trite and pro forma, a waste of space that could be better spent increasing the nearly critically shallow word count.

(And, if all goes well, we will offer far better original coverage of Haiti next week right here on TOP.)

The editorial content of new Time is quite good as far as it goes, though. Joe Klein’s essay on failing schools is excellent, just too short—it ends just as he’s getting going on the topic. And the cover story—about the recent research on brain injuries in former football players—is of a good length and very well written, albeit with a spongy ending. (”Perhaps the football fixing has begun.” Well all right then. Nothing to worry about.) (The New Yorker’s article on the same subject, “Offensive Play” by Malcolm Gladwell, was better, although that’s not a mark against the Time piece.)

A lot of the photographs in the new Time are portraits too, just like in the old—only they’re bigger, and better. And here’s your cover photograph, right here—imagine this Peter Hapak portrait of Harry Carson with the tagline “Football is dangerous.” There’s impact for you.

It’s very tempting to ascribe causes to some of the changes in Time magazine between 1968 and now. The advent of cable and the internet, the dumbing down of the population, greater competition, truncated attention spans (although you’re still reading this, and it’s already longer than the average Time magazine piece). In retrospect I think I was right to be proud of myself that summer day when I was eleven—it marked a rite of passage to a more adult way of learning about the world, and that wasn’t an illusion. I wonder what I would have thought if the issue I read that summer had started out with “10 Questions: Ozzie Nelson will now take your questions”? I think I might have at least sensed I was being pandered to, even at that tender age.

Mike

*It occurs to me belatedly that there is an outside chance Ms. Gibbs will one day see this, so I hasten to add that I’m sure she knows what she is doing. Just not my cup of tea, or slice of cake, if ye ken.

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