THE CLASSIC #10

“Let’s take a ride!” By now, the ride has taken us to issue 10 of The Classic. It seems a long time since we worked pretty much day and night to pull the first issue together, to launch the magazine at AIPAD’s The Photography Show in April 2019. From the moment Bruno Tartarin and I agreed to publish a magazine, there was a period of just seven weeks until art director Mike Derez had to hand issue 1 to the printer. Since then, Mary Pelletier and Jasmine Durand have joined the team.

While every issue is now planned well ahead, there are inevitably always changes in the months leading up to printing. Stories are moved around, reworked, put on hold, expanded, or cut down. And sometimes a story simply doesn’t happen, due to circumstances beyond our control.

It can be more than a little frustrating when that occurs, even more so this time, as I had planned to use an image from such a story for the cover.
There wasn’t much time to find a substitute. But then I remembered one of the images that were published in the book The Unseen Saul Leiter (2022), untitled and undated, shot from the back of a New York cab, sometime in the 1950s
I would guess. The result is one of our strongest covers yet, I think. There’s a new Saul Leiter book coming out, featured in the In Brief section.

In this issue, we launch a new series called The Magazine Files. It made sense to do a series I thought, as a good portion of the images we publish, some now legendary and much sought-after in the market, were initially produced for magazines. And we start the series with an article about the “killed” stories that were produced for the British magazine Picture Post, published 1938-1957.

On The Classic Platform, our online resource, Emma Lowe, conservator at
the Hulton Archive Getty Images, discusses the extensive conservation work she carried out on the mock-ups of the unpublished Picture Post stories.
You will find more new articles on the platform, about Reinhold Thiele, William Grundy, Eugène Atget and much else.