Daria Werbowy
We love this cover of the New York Times’ T Magazine with Daria Werbowy. The tones, the water, the light—everything is perfect.
Fantastic Man
There’s much to like about this magazine—its paper, typography, subjects, recommendations, and style. But what I love more than anything is its tone, exemplified by this erratum slip.
Fire & Knives
Given the popularity of books, television shows, and blog that take food as their central focus, I didn’t understand why there wasn’t a good little magazine devoted to writing about food. Then I discovered Fire & Knives, edited by Tim Hayward, a food quarterly from the UK that just published its fifth issue. I know that it just published its fifth issue because it arrived in my mailbox today, all the way from London. The printing and paper are similar to those of the Believer, whose readers will recognize its familiar smell in Fire & Knives. The design is also similarly, attractively quirky. The binding of Fire & Knives, however, began to fall apart after my first read—and, yes, I read the entire thing cover to cover.
The magazine is devoted to publishing writing about food that, otherwise, wouldn’t have a home in print because it is not timely or trendy or full of recipes. The relieving result is that there are no advertisements, and the closest it comes to trying to sell anything is single book review essay on a selection of volumes about bread (mostly published over the last decade or so.) Samples of content include: a photo essay on tripe, a reminescence of a restaurant that had a (high) minimum weight requirement for entry, a history of a 90-year-old coffee street cart, a list of food and drink requests from various musicians’ riders, and an essay on war and food.
Tina Barney and The Sunday New York Times
I first saw Tina Barney’s work in McSweeney’s, when Wren Weschler wrote a convergence that included Barney’s work. I recently encountered more of Barney’s work in So the Story Goes, which was assembled by the Art Institute of Chicago. My favorite of her photographs is Sunday New York Times, which appears above. I’ve been wanting to plug the Sunday Times for a while, and Barney’s photo seemed like a good prompt with which to do so.
Waking up early on Sunday to read the Times in print at home or at a cafe is one of my favorite things in the world. I can’t say that Barney’s image mirrors my own experience, but I love the sort of chaos and community that her scene of a family reading the Sunday Times depicts.
Subscribe to the New York Times Sunday edition
So the Story Goes
Henri Cartier-Bresson: The Modern Century
This exhibit, curated by Peter Galassi at MoMA in New York and currently in San Francisco, is an excellent retrospective of Cartier-Bresson’s work—the earliest of which makes possible so much of what has photographically come after. In a time when photojournalism needs to defended against skepticism, this exhibit is, perhaps, the best argument we have for its importance and relevance. You cannot come away from it as anything but a believer in photography.