Designers talk about the “text-image relationship” a lot, and this relationship figures prominently into our lessons and our lore. Its subtleties were probed and plumbed by Swiss Modernists and American Postmodernists alike. Its power is the reason we remember Julian Koenig and Helmut Krone’s “Lemon” ad for Volkswagen more than a half century after it was created. Its logic is something you can observe Daniel Eatock working with in his “Word / Format” assignment and Tibor Kalman working around in his “1,000 Words” assignment. I think I first became aware of it in grade school or thereabouts, whenever I was given my first copy of Chris Van Allsburg’s The Mysteries of Harris Burdick, which is a book that still enraptures me today.
Nowhere else is the text-image relationship on such regularly enlightening display as it is when, once a week, I flip open my newest copy of the New Yorker to its fiction page. Well, that’s not entirely accurate—I don’t “flip” right there but rather try to ease up to it, forcing myself to savor the spot art and cartoons, digest pithy captions and newsy asides, until, at the tail end of the well, there is what amounts to a clearing in this word-dense, Caslon-set forest: the opening page of that week’s fiction piece.
For the last three or four years, packrat that I am, I have been saving these pages for no particular reason, but I’ve joined the 21st Century and am now a networked packrat, so 48 of my collected New Yorker Fiction Pages are on Flickr. I’ve added all of these to a Flickr Group so please post more of your own if you have old New Yorkers lying around. I would love to see them. Our group mascot is of course the great Eustace Tilley, his monocle trained on a butterfly in careful study—like a photo editor, loupe in hand, ready to choose the perfect image. (If you’d rather tag pages than join the group, I’ve used the tag “nyerfictionpages” and you are welcome to do the same.)
Looking over the set now, I have some definite favorites. The hulking tree that confronts A Boy in the Forest for example. Or the disembodied oven mitt hand reaching for the telelphone in Harvey’s Dream. Some pages are fragmentary, like the twin snapshots used in Breakup Stories or the sequence of office lights flickering on and off in the eerily monolithic buildings used for The Brief History of the Dead. Some images are rich with narrative, like the visitor at the door in The Surrogate. Others can be jarring non sequiturs, drawn perhaps from a moment in the story or its setting, like the pooling, sticky face of the popsicle in Measuring the Jump. Still others, like Cowboy, deliver on their promise, but not at all in the way you’d expect. Throughout, one feels the work of what must be a small army of researchers and photo editors digging through portfolios and photo banks to pick, pair, crop, commission, and collaborate with authors and editors to strike the right tone, make the right match, marry their chosen images to others’ chosen text to create—at least before I turn the page—a perfect relationship.
