Page 135 - Expanded Photography

Expanded Photography Bob Cotton 135/146
As you can see (previous page) Brownjohn - one of the foremost American graphic designers of the 1950s, was enamoured by letterforms, and inspired by the sprawling free-flowing letterforms that punctuated the American city-scape - in neon, advertising hoardings, shop signs, vehicle livery, graffito, bill-boards, street traffic signals - a free-flowing, non-centralised democratically commercial signage that seemed to express the freedom of choice of the American citizen-cum-consumer. Brown- john’s graphic displays complimented an all-day fashion-show, Disney’ Circarama, and Steichen’s Family of Man exhibition at the American Pavilion at the Brussels World Fair in 1958.
Fred Turner: The Democratic Surround - Multimedia and American Liberalism from World War II to the Psychedelic Sixties 2013 (centre illustration Herbert Bayer: Extended Field of
Vision 1930). https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/D/bo10509859.html
“In the early 1940s, (Margaret) “Mead and her husband Gregory Bateson proposed a democratic alternative (to fascist propaganda). Drawing on their research and travel, especially in Bali, and on their use of photography and film there, they developed a theory of communication designed spe- cifically to train the perceptual apparatuses of American citizens. Building on field-based, dynamic theories of personality drawn particularly from the work of Kurt Lewin, Gordon Allport and Harry Stack Sullivan, they sought to teach Americans to make and review images and systems of images that would reveal the cultural character of alien others. In place of instrumental-driven modes of communication, they developed a theory of what I shall call surrounds - arrays of images and words built into environments that their audiences could enter freely, act spontaneously within, and leave at will. They also created early examples of such environments in two venues: their massive, illustrated 1942 book Balinese Character and their wartime programming for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In each case, they believed that their work would promote tolerance and psychological flexibility. And it would require their audiences to practice the acts of rational, spontaneous choice that defined the democratic personality.” (Fred Turner: The Democratic Sur- round p63).
But the ‘surrounds’ exhibition wasn’t the only pictorial space revolution that was emerging by the 1940s. I next want to look at the integration of set design, costume, dance choreography, optical special effects, and lighting camera mobility that was being trialled in commercial film. (Well, one in particular):