Jessica Helfand
Showing 445 – 456 of 562 results
Jessica Helfand|Essays
First In A Series: Cartophily
Ogden Optical Illusion Cards, early 1930sThe practice of saving cigarette cards — a sub-genre of collecting known as cartophily — formally lies somewhere on the spectrum between postage stamps and posters. (If they resemble the former …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Annals of Ephemera, Part III: Aging 2.0
Aging dye, one of the many materials found in the Making Memories Distressing Kit When I was little, my mother had an acquaintance who purchased, at considerable expense, a piece of brand-new furniture. Soon afterwards, she paid someone …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Reflections on the Ephemeral World, Part Two: Food
Summer, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, 1573. (Oil on canvas, Musée du Louvre, Paris)A year or so ago, I was invited to tea, with perhaps half-a-dozen other women, at the home of the mother of one of my children's friends. Upon arrival, I noticed …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Reflections on The Ephemeral World, Part One: Ink
Half-size manila blank paper notebooks with "makeready" covers by Trip Print Press, TorontoI was on a press check recently, deliriously inhaling the pervasive aroma of ink (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it) whereupon, feeling very …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Iron Man: The Screen Behind the Screen
Robert Downey, Jr. in Iron Man. 2008, Paramount Pictures. Photographs courtesy of Hollywood Chicago.In Barry Levinson’s 1994 thriller, Disclosure, Demi Moore plays a computer specialist who is sued for sexual harassment. (Michael Douglas …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
National Scrapbooking Day
Scrapbook kept by Frederick Nixon-Nirdlinger, Philadelphia, PA 1909. Special Collections, University of Delaware Library.Today, scrapbooking enthusiasts across the United States celebrate National Scrapbooking Day, heralding the meteoric …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Viewer Discretion Advised
Identification card for Anny-Yolande Horowitz, deported to Auschwitz on September 11, 1942. She was seven years old.Early last month, French President Nicholas Sarkozy proposed a new education plan in which every fifth grader would have to …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Animal Magnetism
Magazines are the sole industry in which you cannot help but judge a book by its cover.
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Woody Allen's Typography
Woody Allen's typography. (Thanks to Michael Brenner.) [JH]
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Gone, Baby, Gone (Things, Part II)
Things, as we all know, connect us to the world we inhabit. Big or small, expensive or insignificant, our attachments to other people and places begin with things. As infants, we navigate by smell and touch; with the social and verbal …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Remembering Paul Rand
My graduate thesis at Yale was a long, dissertation-style treatise on the history of the square. Only one member of the graduate faculty actually took the time to read it — and that was Paul Rand. "With what little time I've had to …
Jessica Helfand|Essays
Things, Part I
In an age characterized by elevated environmental awareness — reducing our carbon footprint, enhancing our sustainable output — we remain obsessed with our attachment to the material world.