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Wednesday, 2 October 2002 |
Perception is everything. Perception is reality.
In the early days of the magazine that became Black+White its entire writing staff consisted of one nervous individual ensconced in a tiny one-room flat in Elizabeth Bay. The room was furnished with a borrowed typewriter, a desk, a chair, and a futon in the middle of the floor.
Down the road, in the plushly appointed offices of a publisher of small-circulation specialist fashion magazines, a hard-bitten Group Editor and his sceptical Features Editor sidekick were impatiently waiting delivery of the writer’s first batch of stories.
The stories would be used to confirm whether the writer’s imagined new magazine of Australian arts and culture might have a potential readership. The editors intended to print them in one of the publisher’s failing fashion mags, and then follow them up with a reader survey in the next issue.
The writer had never written for publication before. That’s why he was nervous.
The two editors were under threat of losing their jobs. That’s why they were impatient.
The new magazine was like nothing the publisher had ever published before. That’s why he was confused.
Back in his room, around midnight, the writer gritted his teeth, rehearsed his telephone speech one last time, picked up the handset and dialled a number in southern Europe.
“Helmut Newton here,” answered the photographer, and so began my interview with the most infamous photographer Australia has ever exported into the world.
That article was the third that I wrote in my first series of reviews and interviews with photographers in Australia and elsewhere. Two stories were printed in an issue of a fashion magazine that is now defunct, while the Newton article went on to be published in the first issue of Black+White magazine, the one that Steve Vizard held up for the TV cameras on Tonight Live.
Black+White rapidly became a success, a badge of recognition for the inner urban creative tribes, a cult magazine for the general populace, and each edition sold out as soon as the stacks appeared in the newsagencies.
Over time, Black+White’s subject matter morphed into a mixture of design, film, pop culture celebrities, the visual arts, and especially soft core erotica when the publisher began exerting his influence.
But the magazine’s founding mission, its central thread, was to provide a platform that would place Australian artists and filmmakers in the same spotlight as their much admired foreign counterparts. Cringe-busting pure and simple.
Local perceptions about local talent changed for the better, and many artists’ careers were jump started when their work appeared in its pages. Black+White opened doors that might otherwise have stayed closed.
Foreign perceptions about Australian talent changed radically, a fact I confirmed first hand after moving to London as Black+White’s European Contributing Editor. Although the magazine remained scarce on newsstands there, it was a revelation to find subscription copies in the libraries of every advertising agency, design firm and publisher I visited.
For a brief and shining moment, before Black+White succumbed as so many magazines do to repetition and the loss of its founding vision, it created the perception that remarkable things were afoot in the nation.
And they were, and they are.
6:20:35 PM 
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Joe Gillespie’s WPDFD website for web designers is providing further coverage of CSS this issue. A List Apart also has further CSS coverage.
10:53:29 AM
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While walking over to the coffee shop for a quick early morning cappucino this morning I spotted a well-dressed female executive walk up to a well-designed rubbish bin in the park near the lake, and she began caressing the top of the bin while staring into its interior.
I came back the same way after an interval of 15 minutes, and she was in exactly the same spot, doing exactly the same thing. She finally stopped and walked away after caressing and gazing at the rubbish bin for about 30 minutes.
10:30:26 AM
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The Sopranos has still not returned to Perth TV, but the other HBO production now playing here is Band of Brothers. An excellent series. The last episode was about the Battle of the Bulge, in Bastogne, where the soldiers, underequipped and underdressed, huddled together in shallow foxholes under thin blankets while the world turned white, silent and cold.
I could really identify with that—I rented a room in a house in Sydney’s west once. The house was new, but it had been built of a hightech fiberboard and had no insulation or heating whatsoever in its thin walls and roof cavity. I was constantly frozen in the winter. I got out as fast as I could.
10:20:57 AM
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I caught an ad on the TV announcing that award-winning HBO TV series Six Feet Under, which stars Australian actor Rachel Griffiths, is finally coming to Channel 9 in Perth, on the 8th.
The program has been showing in all the other Australian cities on Channel 9 for ages, and is now in its second season everywhere else. I guess I had better stock up on videotapes. Pity there is no such thing as TiVo here!
9:25:41 AM
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© Copyright 2002 Karl-Peter Gottschalk.
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