That moment is in the early spring of 1997, when Emigre magazine published its 42nd issue. Emigre was initially launched in Sacramento, CA, by Rudy VanderLans (who was born in Holland) as a magazine to showcase the cultural contributions of émigrés like himself. But by issue 3, in late 1985, VanderLans had begun to experiment with his wife Zuzana Licko’s coarse-resolution typefaces, like this one.
The magazine continued to focus its efforts on design, and, with issue 10, produced in 1988, its transition into full-fledged design journal was complete. It will conclude publishing this summer with its 69th issue, and, in so doing, will join ranks with some of the most influential publications our profession has known. In 1995, the magazine shrank its size by half
and concentrated its efforts on charting the impact of graphic design and graphic designers on their culture, and vice versa. In the spring of 1997, where our story begins, it changed once more.
Emigre would now become a full-color glossy with full-page ads, and, with a circulation of 45,000—90 times that of its first issue—it would be given away free to subscribers and read by designers and nondesigners alike. In the spring of 1997, Emigre magazine had entered a new era. VanderLans dubbed the new issue “The Mercantile Issue.”
At last, the magazine could afford to showcase color photography, and VanderLans did not hesitate at the opportunity.
The inside front cover of Emigre 42 is split in half vertically, showing two 35mm color photographs top and bottom. On the top, a roadside median, and beyond, several Joshua trees along the road, equally spaced and of varying heights. The tracked-out yellow letters below read “spacing.” On the bottom, a landscape view out the driver’s-side window of a car, with a second landscape visible in the side-view mirror. Hovering above the mirror, a red box enclosing the yellow letters of the word “Framing.” On the opposite page, the first of Emigre’s new format, the credit reads, “This spread from the forthcoming book: More Principles of Typography by Emigre. Due out spring 2000.” The book never appeared. Instead, the photographs, which, though uncredited, must be VanderLans’s own, became part of a much larger project, running at least the duration of the next 20 issues and spanning at least five books that blend VanderLans’s photography with thoughts on the nature of design, writing, and music.
Before the books began appearing, though, there was a germination process in the magazine that is evident in hindsight. First an important shift in tone—Emigre 43’s title, “Designers are people too,”
immediately put the magazine’s goals on a broader footing. The cover features three quotidian color photos of a TV from the dinner table, dirty dishes, washing up.
Again, on the inside front cover,
one of VanderLans’s 35mm landscapes looms large: this one, full bleed, depicts a cluster of desert rocks on which a great number of names have been tagged. They resemble the markings on the caves of Altamira. The letters above read, “People are designers too.” This pair of statements introduces a central theme in the work to come: designing is an intrinsic part of human life dating back to the caves of Altamira.
Likewise, the vocation of the designer is an expression of humanity, just as art, music, and writing are. People, from our earliest ancestors, have a will to name, to write, to print, to organize, just as designers do.
And designers need to rinse the dishes, just as people do. The activities are parts of a whole, needlessly separated, in need of joining.
In Emigre 49, “Everything is for sale,” the collection of overturned grocery carts in desert brush, left by pranksters and vagabonds, suggests exasperation at the activities of shopping and moving while, at the same time, typifying them. In this issue, a book called Palm Desert is advertised for the first time, although a real taste of its content is only teasingly evoked.
By Emigre 50, the experimentation had reached a new level. The title page
informs us, misleadingly, that VanderLans’s article is “A Type Specimen,” for “A New Series of Venetian Old-Style Printing Types Designed by John Downer.” In fact, the article is a challenge both to the notion of “specimen-ness” and “old-style-ness,” taking two ideas native to typography and giving them a more original, broader metaphorical context.
A “specimen,” of course, is what we call the showing of a typeface in use, generally in a commercial context, but a “specimen” is also a scientific term that describes something that represents a whole. The meaning here is ambiguous: yes, VanderLans is showing the typeface, but isn’t he also showing the desert?
The article includes a list of “Birds, Mammals, and Reptiles,” just as a field guide would, but it also includes a series of photographic grids documenting sprinkler heads, landscape lighting, and outdoor electrical switch-boxes.
Like Downer’s typeface Vendetta, we’re forced to ask the question: what do we have here? Is this an update or a regression? Beyond its form, what makes Downer’s typeface native to Venetian Renaissance printing?
And beyond its subject matter, what makes VanderLans’s photography native to the landscape of places like Venice, CA?
(On the upper right is a grid of porch lights published as part of a study on the town of Venice, CA, by architecture students in 1977.)
Matters are only complicated when we learn the running text for the “specimen,” first published in 1920, is an old text for a new landscape. Clearly things have changed, and yet it all feels so chillingly apt. The question is one of evolution versus invasion—has the landscape evolved into its current self, or has it been invaded by forces external to it? It is a question for émigrés.
A Burger King drive-thru directional rises in the frame, but a table shows that average yearly rainfall has remained relatively consistent from year to year. VanderLans includes the government’s water analysis against images of a sprinkler and a tangled hose, along with lists for the Latin and Spanish names of trees growing in front of strip-mall signage. Then: we see photos of the ranch home, the last-gasp vista of the golf course, and the iconic Southern California swimming pool, home to fish of a human sort, a place we observe many times through many other eyes.
