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Archive Fever: Ralph Ginzburg

By Peggy Roalf   Wednesday December 7, 2016

Today’s edition of DART is a true Archive-Fest. It begins with an email sent this morning by Matthew Carson, Librarian & Archivist at the ICP Library. He has taken on the task of archiving the papers of Cornell Capa, founding director of ICP, and in a recent post remarked, “It is a LOT of material. There are some real gems in amongst the boxes and boxes of materials. We shall be sharing some of them with you over the coming weeks and months and years. Enjoy!”

For your reading and viewing enjoyment today [this is no exaggeration], we present a look at the story of Ralph Ginzburg, renowned publisher of Avant Garde  and  Eros magazines. According to Steven Heller, who wrote the New York Times obituary of Ginzberg, “From 1968 to 1971 Mr. Ginzburg…published Avant Garde, an art and culture magazine designed by [Herb] Lubalin, whose logo for the magazine was the basis for one of the most popular typefaces of the era. Although Avant Garde included erotic material (an entire issue was devoted to John Lennon's erotic lithographs),…the focus was more on radical politics, including the "No More War" poster competition.”

Avant Garde  rocked the design world for a brief run of 16 volumes between January 1968 and July 1971, with issues including Bert Stern’s posterized nude photos of Marilyn Monroe, Picasso’s erotic engravings, and new designs for the dollar bill by Seymour Chwast, R.O. Blechman and Edward Gorey, among others. Listed on the masthead of Vol 3 was Peter Schjeldahl [longtime art critic at The New Yorker] as Features Editor.


Avant Garde, Volume 2, January 1968; photo: Richard Avedon

But the essence of Matthew’s message today was a folder “marked with big sharpie drawn letters ‘Ralph Ginzburg’” that includes personal notes by Ginzburg about his conviction and incarceration for distributing obscene literature through the mails. Matthew wrote, “After a brief trial in June 1962, Ginzburg was convicted in the city of Philadelphia by the U.S. Court for the Eastern District of Pensa-Tucky* for violating federal obscenity laws. He was sentenced to five years in prison but ultimately served only eight months of that sentence. [God knows what the righteous VP Elect and Grand inquisitor Pence would have made of it all].  After various appeals, the case was argued before the Supreme Court in 1965, and in 1966 Mr. Ginzburg’s conviction was upheld. Despite protests by First Amendment advocates, he served eight months in a federal prison in 1972 after the Supreme Court refused to hear an appeal of his sentence.” *Ginzburg lived and worked in NYC; however, he had taken a P.O. box mailing address in Intercourse, Pennsylvania, for distributing the magazine and its promo materials.

Right: Eros No. 4, Winter 1962; photo: Bert Stern

Matthew continues, “It has been suggested that the real issue with Eros was that in Eros No. 4 (Winter, 1962) included ‘an eight-page “photographic tone poem”‘ titled “Black and White in Color”, featuring a nude couple (no genitalia shown), but the girl was white and the man was African-American. Would there have been persecution and prosecution if the photographs had featured a couple of the same colour? This was after all a challenge to the taboo of interracial love. The same publication also included a previously suppressed portfolio of nude photographs of Marilyn Monroe, taken by Bert Stern. (Intriguingly it was U.S Attorney General Robert Kennedy who indicted Ginzburg – can you feel the synergy here?). Clearly nudity wasn’t the issue.”

Left: Eros No. 4, Winter 1962; Black and White in Color, photo: Ralph M. Hattersley, Jr. 

According to Steve Heller, “Mr. Ginzburg shut down the magazine when he started serving his sentence. Afterward, he and his wife tried to revive it as a tabloid newspaper, but it lasted only one issue. It was a costly mistake that drove them to the brink of bankruptcy, which was averted only through the success of yet another periodical, the consumer adviser Moneysworth, which attained a circulation of 2.4 million. At 55 Mr. Ginzburg retired from publishing to be a photojournalist, selling his very first photograph to The New York Post. He remained there as a freelance spot-news photographer until his death [in 2006] and specialized in New York scenes and sporting events….”

Ginzburg, whose self-published titles included “100 Years of Lynching,” [still available] a compilation of newspaper accounts that exposed American racism, would likely have been a force in the political realm today except for a mis-match of a few decades.

“I have always felt that I might have become a major force in American publishing had it not been for my conviction. Instead, I’m just a curious footnote.”– Ralph Ginzburg

Archive: Read Matthew Carson’s entire post here. Read Steve Heller’s NYTimes obituary here. View the entire digitized archive of Avant Garde here. More By Steve Heller, in Eye, here

 

 


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