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Carl Fischer (photographer)

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Carl Fischer (May 3, 1924 – April 7, 2023) was an American art director and autodidact magazine photographer. His work for covers and pictures stories in Esquire and other magazines were controversial, original prints of which, and published copies, are held in a number of international museums.[1]

Early life

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Carl Fischer was born on May 3, 1924, to Irma (Schwerin) and Joseph Fischer, and raised in Brooklyn.[2] He took painting at Cooper Union but majored in graphic design, graduating in 1948 with the Augustus St. Gaudens Medal.[3] He worked as an art director before receiving a Fulbright Scholarship in 1951 and went to England where he studied book design and typography at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, and used their darkroom to teach himself photography from library books.[4]

Esquire

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Fischer began his career as an advertising agency art director in New York working with Paul Rand and Herb Lubalin then began photographing for Esquire magazine when Harold Hayes became its editor in chief in 1963 and was commissioned throughout the 1960s and early 1970s for covers and their accompanying photo-reportage. Working with the magazine's creative consultant George Lois, who thought Fischer was one of the few photographers who understood his ideas, they devised what became amongst the most famous and provocative Esquire covers of the 1960s decade; Muhammad Ali as a martyred St Sebastian,[5][6] an image so popular that it was used as a protest poster,[7] and a montage of Andy Warhol drowning in a giant can of tomato soup.[8][9] The magazine's audience, which had been flagging, was regenerated by these covers and by 1967 Esquire was achieving a $3M profit.[10] By 1968 all of the covers for that year featured Fischer's photographs. His studio was a townhouse on East Eighty-third Street, New York City, where he lived.[11][2]

In 1990 Steven Heller, senior art director of The New York Times, when asked what icons of American graphic design were worth preserving, declared;

George Lois's Esquire covers from the mid-196os to the very early '70s are. Most were collaborations with photographer Carl Fischer that took an average of three days to produce; they are considered among the most powerful propaganda imagery in any medium and certainly the most memorable magazine covers ever.[12]

Interviewed by the magazine in 2015 he recalled;

One of the first assignments Hayes gave me was a series of portraits of Southern segregationists. He said, 'Look, we don't want to be seen as editorializing. We want to be fair and we want to give their point of view, so don't use your goddamn wide-angle lens.' He thought that lens would make them look bad, so while I didn't use it, I did make some little changes that I think made [the segregationists] look as ugly as we all thought they were.

In that instance Fischer had recopied the pictures on his enlarger to increase their contrast and thus coarsen the skin texture, with unflattering results.[12]

Among his other subjects were movie stars, artists and athletes,[13] but the covers were often politically charged, and included war criminal William Calley surrounded by Vietnamese children,[14] or during the peak of the civil rights movement, Sonny Liston as an angry black Santa Claus.[15] Hayes, in a 1981 article in Adweek, recalled the response to the cover which cost the magazine dearly in lost advertising revenue;

Sonny Liston was a bad black who beat up good blacks, like Floyd Patterson; there was no telling what he might do to a white man. In 1963, when this was the sort of possibility that preyed on white men's minds everywhere, [Carl Fischer's and] George Lois's Christmasy cover was something more than an inducement for readers to buy Dad extra shaving soap. In the national climate of 1963, thick with racial fear, Lois's angry icon insisted on several things: the split in our culture was showing; the notion of racial equality was a bad joke; the felicitations of this season-goodwill to all men, etc.-carried irony more than sentiment.[12]

Prior to the advent of digital imaging, much of Fischer's photographic illustration and advertising work required complex montage and retouching,[16] and ironically included May 1968 cover showing Richard Nixon with closed eyes submitting to having his face made up for television, over the cover line; "Nixon's last chance. (This time he'd better look right)."[12]

After collaborating through the 1960s he and Lois, disputing who should be credited with the covers, including some falsely claimed by Lois, such as the one of St. Patrick's Cathedral,[17] went their separate ways in the early 1970s.[8] After Hayes left Esquire in 1973, Fischer gradually ceased working for the magazine but continued in advertising photography.[18]

Fischer directed television commercials and taught as an adjunct professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A member of the Directors Guild of America, he also served as President of the Art Directors Club.[19]

Fischer died on April 7, 2023, at the age of 98.[20]

Awards

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  • Mark Twain Journalism Award[21]
  • Cleo Award[22]
  • Art Directors Club gold and silver medals[21]
  • Augustus St. Gaudens Medal[3]

Collections

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References

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  1. ^ a b Golya, Alexander (2022-12-19). "Carl Fischer". CAMERA WORK. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  2. ^ a b Browne, Turner (1983). Macmillan biographical encyclopedia of photographic artists & innovators. Elaine Partnow. New York: Macmillan. p. 194. ISBN 0-02-517500-9. OCLC 8552746.
  3. ^ a b "Augustus Saint-Gaudens Award Winners". Cooper Union Alumni Association. 2014-12-17. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  4. ^ Belth, Alex (14 April 2023). "How Carl Fischer Helped Define the Esquire Look: The legendary photographer is most famous for his iconic covers, but the breadth of his work goes much deeper". Esquire.
  5. ^ Castelli, Elizabeth A. (2006). "The Ambivalent Legacy of Violence and Victimhood: Using Early Christian Martyrs to Think With". Spiritus. 6. The Johns Hopkins University Press: 1–24. doi:10.1353/scs.2006.0028. S2CID 144931418.
  6. ^ Nord, David Paul; Rubin, Joan Shelley; Schudson, Michael (2009). A history of the book in America. Volume 5, The enduring book, print culture in postwar America. Chapel Hill: American Antiquarian Society. p. 111. ISBN 978-1-4696-2721-2. OCLC 919252585.
  7. ^ a b The Museum of Modern Art Department of Communications (2008). "Press Release: George Lois: The Esquire Covers The Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Gallery, The Philip Johnson Architecture and Design Galleries, third floor April 25, 2008-March 31, 2009" (PDF). Museum of Modern Art.
  8. ^ a b Lois, George (2008). George Lois on His Creation of the Big Idea. Editions Assouline.
  9. ^ Warhol, Andy (2022). The Andy Warhol diaries. Pat Hackett (First Twelve trade paperback ed.). New York. ISBN 978-1-5387-3918-1. OCLC 1319743058.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  10. ^ Meggs, Philip B.; Purvis, Alston W. (2016). Meggs' history of graphic design (Sixth, ebook ed.). Hoboken, N.J.: Wiley. p. 437. ISBN 978-1-119-13620-0. OCLC 946992970.
  11. ^ "Carl Fischer". Esquire. 164 (3): 108. October 2015.
  12. ^ a b c d Polsgrove, Carol (2001). It wasn't pretty, folks, but didn't we have fun? : surviving the '60s with Esquire's Harold Hayes. Oakland, Calif.: RDR Books. p. 269. ISBN 1-57143-091-1. OCLC 48461270.
  13. ^ Bonanos, Christopher (2017). Highbrow, lowbrow, brilliant, despicable : 50 years of New York. Chris Cristiano, Aaron Garza, Randy Minor (hardcover ed.). New York: Simon and Schuster. p. 267. ISBN 978-1-5011-6684-6. OCLC 975085848.
  14. ^ Barnett, Louise (2010). Atrocity and American Military Justice in Southeast Asia: Trial by Army (ebook ed.). Routledge. p. 206. ISBN 9781135172367.
  15. ^ Raiford, Leigh (2011). Imprisoned in a luminous glare : photography and the African American freedom struggle. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. pp. 142, 174, 175. ISBN 978-0-8078-8233-7. OCLC 701719774.
  16. ^ 68th Art Directors annual and third international exhibition. Art Directors Club. Mies, Switzerland: Roto Vision for the Art Directors Club. 1989. p. 320. ISBN 9782880461027. OCLC 1280833989.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  17. ^ "SlamXhype". 21 June 2018.
  18. ^ The 56th Art Directors Club annual of advertising, editorial and television art and design. New York, N.Y: Watson-Guptill Publications. 1977. p. 132. ISBN 9780823019090.
  19. ^ The 74th art directors annual and ninth annual international exhibition. Myrna Davis, Art Directors Club. Mies [Switzerland]: Roto Vision. 1995. ISBN 2-88046-244-4. OCLC 34822297.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: others (link)
  20. ^ Genzlinger, Neil (2023-04-11). "Carl Fischer, Who Shot Attention-Getting Esquire Covers, Dies at 98". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2023-04-18.
  21. ^ a b UAL (2019-01-08). "Carl Fischer in London". UAL. Retrieved 2023-04-19.
  22. ^ "Seven Great American Photo Artists" (PDF). The Belskie Museum Of Art & Science. 16 March 2012. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  23. ^ "The Indomitable Spirit: Photographers and Artists Respond in the Time of AIDS". International Center of Photography. 2016-02-23. Retrieved 2023-04-19.
  24. ^ "Works of: Carl Fischer". Eastman Museum. Retrieved 19 April 2023.
  25. ^ "Carl Fischer 1924–2023". Spencer Museum of Art. Retrieved 2023-04-19.
  26. ^ Museum, Victoria and Albert (1966). "Susan Bottomly and Andy Warhol | Fischer, Carl | V&A Explore The Collections". Victoria and Albert Museum: Explore the Collections. Retrieved 2023-04-19.
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