We Killed Magazines

Life was brown and drab in the late 70’s in South Africa. Fashion was boring, you had to sew your own clothes from patterns bought at fabric shops and Woolworths looked like a shop in 1950’s Kazakhstan, it was depressing to enter and we only went there for school clothes. South African men were particularly unattractive, their haircuts and moustaches. I came to that conclusion at 10 years old. I would walk around the mall with my mother, wondering why South African men were so unstylish. The shorts, the socks. I knew how terribly unstylish they were, because by that age I was had become an accomplished magazine hoarder already. I came from a family who had international magazines in the home. My mom flew in French Elle and Marie Claire. Reading them cover to cover. My dad had Esquire, Time, Newsweek and GQ. My uncle had a stash of Playboys which all the cousins knew where to find.

Oh, the men in these pages were suave, looked like Robert Redford and had a glass of Whiskey in their hand. They looked like Mad Men. They smoked. They wore in Italian suits. Being from a family who spent money on travel and not on investments, I walked around Paris at 12 my mouth gaping unattractively open looking at the men. All 12 years old of me sitting at a side walk cafe, my eyes following him as he was walking past, he smiled and winked at me. I thought the earth would swallow me up. I was embarrassed for years. He was perfection.

Our trips home, was followed by a terrible depression for both my mom that would last weeks. My mom started buying travel magazines, and we would spend whole days pouring over travel photos of Ubud, Seattle, Antibes. All we wanted were hotels, cafes and shopping in the streets of all these towns and cities. But alll we had were sanctions and political upheaval.  So my mom would save half her salary each month for us to travel once a year. Apartheid gave us a strong currency. To this day I do not understand it, but we could travel and shop with a strong Rand as currency.

So for two weeks a year, my mom and I were in heaven. The rest of the year, we would be in yearning. And all that helped us was magazines.

I was an awkward child, shy and curvy. Ok, I was fat. With headgear. But I am trying to be self-affirming. Being curvy in those years was akin to being an outcast. Look at movies form those times, and documentaries. People were thin. Tiny. That is a story for another day, but people were really thin in the 70’s and 80’s. I was socially awkward, and all I wanted to do was read magazines. I lived and breathed and existed for magazines.

I made my mom double park outside Estoril in Hillbrow on a Friday afternoon, to see if any shipment came in. We got the September issue in December. There was a three months delay on all titles. Seeing a new cover on the rack felt like the clouds opening up and a ray of light shining on the magazine and angels singing. Most Fridays, I would get back into the car, dejected. No shipping arrived that week. Oh, but when it did, I loaded my arms up, picking them like golden tulips, knowing that my weekend was going to be beautiful. Glamorous. Colourful.

We drove home thru the dust and gloom that was this dreadful country with its dreadful President who pointed his finger at us while making spitting speeches. I thought he was Hilter reincarnate. I saw black people walking home while I sat in the car, listening to Radio Five. I felt ashamed. And only someone my age, can understand that shame. But it was ok, my generation was going to change everything, I told my friends. In the meantime, I would crack open the Vogue and was heavenly transported.

I read every article in Vogue, British and American, USA Bazaar, Mademoiselle, Vanity Fair, Self and Glamour. I knew the names of every photographer, every model, ever fashion designer. I studied it as if God himself would test me on it one day. One day. Everything was about one day. One day I will buy an Armani jacket, one day I will have a Gap T-Shirt, one day I will have a house like that  a Porsche like that. One day I will own a magazine. One day.

And then when I was a bit older, all of 14 years old  I finally found a tribe I felt I belonged to at last. I was the outsider from the days of kindergarten. But after a cycle of schools both Afrikaans and English, farm school and posh.. I finally found a place for myself in Johannesburg Art School and friends who were outsiders like me. And it was The Face and NME and various other British music magazines that showed us how to dress and what to listen to. That we belonged. We bought photocopied I-D magazines, until I could get the Indian man at Estoril books , who for 40 years of me sold me magazines, and he never bothered to ask my name, to he ship in I-D magazine too. So he did.

My mom would park the car in front of Exclusive Books in Hillbow, because Look and Listen was next door and we needed books, and records and we needed it like oxygen. My mom would order her French music and I ordered my British bands. It took us three months to find out Ian from Joy Division had committed suicide. It took weeks to get what we ordered, and I will run to the postbox number 207 Honeydew with the key, hoping the box will have a gift. Mostly it was negative, nada. But the elation of getting my hands on the pages of magazines. Heaven. I have never done drugs. I don’t think I needed to, I got that high from a magazine.

Above the amazing work of Fabien Baron , read dossiermag.net/home/ultimate-inspiration-fabien-baron?rq=Fabien%20Baron%20

I have been thinking about writing this for months. Hearing the news of our magazines closing one by one. But I have a confession. Local magazines infuriated me. They spoke down to the reader. The layout was atrocious , the paper was thin and bled and the fashion editorials boring. I thought it was a waste of paper. Later in my life, when I was a photographer for all the local magazines, I was never given the honour of a fashion shoot. My ideas did not suit the brand I was told.

I bought a digital camera that costs as much as a Mercedes Benz and was told by an Afrikaans magazine that they would NEVER under any circumstances shoot anything but film. I was given pages from overseas magazines and told to copy the lighting and background, and not deviate. I was told by Oprah magazine that no model was to ever sit, nor smile with teeth showing. Oh the times we had to reshoot a whole days work because a garment was not ironed. Or a model’s skin was not good that day, reshoot. Magazine editors were like CEO’s-high and mighty. You would never interact with them, they were always in important meetings. I dealt with the “workers”. We knew our place in the hierarchy and it was low. And we were grateful.

I stuck with advertising photography. I knew what they expected, and they paid well, and the egos, believe it or not was not so inflated. Only much later in my career did I shoot with magazines. I liked shooting food, the people were kind. The work was plenty. Everyone needs to eat. Food photography was good to me. I was a single mom and the money helped me raise two.

I thought if only I could start my own magazine, with creative and artistic content, I could succeed. I will never forget after printing the first issue of Dossier, having an early morning meeting with the then owner of Caxtons, a lovely man. He looked at the issue and said he wanted to cry. He had never seen such bravery and beauty he said, but that I was going to fail miserably because I was to understand that mediocrity sells. He paid the bill for the coffee at Stephanie's in Hyde Park and said I can cry on his shoulder any time but I was doomed. My magazine was too European. Too international.

I sat at that table after he left. My dad held this man in good esteem. He was most gracious to meet me at 8.00 in the morning being as busy as he was. And I stared into space. Well, I said to myself, let me be doomed but I am going to take this bloody magazine to as far as it can go even if it kills me. Which it almost did. But that is a long story in itself.

I sat in lockdown with my phone in my hand, tears rolling down my cheeks for the loss. Loss of my dad, my previous life, you know how it feels. It is all a loss. And I downloaded TikTok like my son told me to. I sat a whole afternoon, then second afternoon celebrities dancing another people doing silly things to understand why it was so popular . It was the beginning of lockdown and everyone was doing dance routines and voice over clips. This one male model has over two million followers and he just stared into the screen and blinked. He has great eyelashes. Then the next moment, we went from dancing to clips of Louis Vuitton being looted in five minutes and Madison Ave boarded up, as trouble started in the USA. One minute its rich people showing their lockdown spots the next minute it’s police and looting. It became about news very quickly.

So I sit in the sun with my cup of tea and start analysing how we went from the most beautifully crafted magazines, articles written by seasoned journalists, the best photographers themselves celebrities-shooting Chanel and Versace and Dior on the most beautiful women in the world — to a housewife doing a dance on TikTok, and that getting more attention.

We all know the internet came like the black reaper. It killed the excitement of going into a store and buying a CD-one you have been anxiously waiting for. The time spent going through racks, flicking through plastic holders until you find a CD which you are going to listen to until it is scratched. Opening the plastic covering and finding the treasure: the booklet inside with photographs of your hero and lyrics. Too beautiful. Things had a sense of time and place. We had to drive to a place, and for the most part had to take a bus or beg a parent. We needed a Saturday morning when parents were not working. It was an occasion. An event. Like buying a magazine was. CD’s were also a massive risk of excitement when we got the one we waited for in our hands.

The internet has made everything banal. We can see everything immediately. We can watch history happen before our very eyes. We can see a music video as it is released, we do not wait for it to be shown on a Friday evening at 6.00, our fingers ready to press record on VHS so we can watch it later over and over.

Yes, the internet. So many good things. So many lives ruined. Jobs ruined. The double edged sword. We love it. It brings us into a space where we can speak to people all over the world, yet it killed so many good things too.

For me the addiction of the magazine was the information I got. I saw new designers, artists and literally spent hours looking at a particular fashion shoot. The detail in lighting and set design, and make up. Make up artists were renowned. Heralded. Fashion editors literally had rose petals thrown were they walked. Models were “Everything”. They even got heroic names, Super Models.

Now, you click through Insta and bit of TikTok, Pinterest, and we watch what we want to watch - a movie we want to see, we pirate it-no more ceremony of popcorn and queues. We are prisoners of our own homes.

One can literally see jobs disappear in front of our eyes. Poof. And we do it every day. We kill jobs. Now as my industry is sitting on couches biting our nails and drinking Xanor while we can still pay for it, I wonder if it was worth it.

Is instant gratification worth losing artistry? Once we had David Bailey, Demarcellier, Bruce Weber, Steven Meisel meeting and meticulously putting together fashion shoots with the right model for the right outfit, which was chosen off many rails and locations scouted, air tickets bought and hotels booked. Now we have an Istagramer taking a pic of herself on her couch at home. she gets 400,000 likes for that post, but how are we meant to feel excited and inspired by someone on a couch?

Our poor kids do not know that photography was once an art form. That models were once like athletes, chosen for a talent to look incredible in a dress, poses that only they knew how to pull off. Our poor kids do not know what it is like to be excited about something. They have no thrills. We went from cooked gourmet meals to drive thru fries, with the net. And we did it with our eyes open. We chose it.

One influencer stands in-front of a white wall and gets 800,000 likes and now a professional crew who spent a month planning a shoot and it gets 30 likes. Why did we do this? We took jobs away from printers, logistic companies delivering magazines to book stores, we took away the layout designers, the fashion editor, the beauty editor — we literally threw thousands of jobs onto a fire and turned to our phones.

We killed the magazines.

There once was a culture that had respected journalists who spent months on gathering information on a person or subject and write a piece for a publication we could trust. We killed that too. Now we have no idea who is feeding us with information-we are left out in a wilderness and we have to find out which plants we can forage from. Some are poisonous. But how are we to know. We have to taste and find out.

We suck on some plants that put us into a trance. And it feels good, the pain is alleviated. For a while. We Netflix. We Facebook. We beg for likes. A ”like” from a stranger can give you a small chance of a client giving you a bit of money for a story. Brands have thrown an industry under the bus. For decades the print and publishing media has existed for brands-we have planned our lives around making brands look good and for getting them sales — spending months around plans to keep brands in the public eye. And what do they do at the first opportunity? They get an in-house social media kid to generate content that people will see for a second or two. We as the world, collectively decided to make Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos the riches men in the world and put millions out of jobs in their industries, ended their careers. We did not want to get out of our pyjamas. And we did not want to go for a drive. And then, is this not funny, our governments make laws for us to do the very things we wanted to do. Stay at home.

I still try to bring everyone some beauty. Inspiration in art. In images. In fashion. Style. I do so with a bank that hates my name. Do what you love and let it kill you is the saying, no. Yes, thats what I do.

And I want to say a speech thanks for Neville Brody who bought us so much beauty with his typography. And in my next story I will write about the genius of Jean Paul Goude. It’s going to be good! (Sorry could not resist)

We keep on fighting the good fight!