If one were asked to distinguish between the local section of an Exclusive Books magazine rack today and its equivalent 10 years ago, one might be hard-pressed to find any significant difference.
True, there are incrementally more ‘men’s†glossies on the shelves and our growing middle class seems to have spawned a legion of bourgeois kitchen manuals, but very few, if any, surviving publications stand out as radically individual or have the budget and interested readership to deviate from the tropes of the traditional magazine form.
According to Benjamin Joffe-Walt and Mauro Bedoni, the current editor and photography editor of Colors magazine, all this has the potential to change, if we can just find ourselves a lenient benefactor.
Last week Bedoni and Joffe-Walt, whose work is based at the Fabrica research centre near Venice, Italy, visited Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Art and the Market Photo Workshop in Newtown, Johannesburg, to discover undiscovered photographers and to proselytise for their unconventional brand of magazine-making. Colors is a quarterly concept magazine started in 1991 by Tibor Kalman to promote United Colors of Benetton, a European clothing manufacturer notorious in the 1990s for its socially provocative advertising campaigns. Benetton decided early on that it would use social and cultural controversy, rather than sex, to sell clothes and Colors follows this mandate.
Entirely funded by Benetton and published by Fabrica, Benetton’s creative communications centre, each edition of Colors addresses a different socio-cultural theme and uses its international network of contributors to explore how a chosen theme manifests in different parts of the world. The latest edition, titled Money, considers money to be both ‘an illusion†and a tool to ‘solve social problemsâ€.
Contributors look at oil-for-doctors trading between Cuba and Venezuela, a pig-tusk bank in the Pentecost Islands and a sim-card economy in remote Kenya. There is no advertising in the magazine — not even for Benetton — and in most issues the only clue that the magazine has anything at all to do with Benetton is the title. It seems odd that the sponsor remains almost entirely hands-off. Joffe-Walt explains: ‘As long as it’s provocative and appealing to young people, they are really happy with whatever we want to do. We actually have less editorial interference than, say, a newspaper.â€
Colors’s semi-permanent editorial staff and independent contributors are very young. Typically almost all the photography work and writing featured in an edition like Money is produced by contributors between the ages of 18 and 25. This means that the magazine has an incredibly high turnover rate. Both Joffe-Walt and Bedoni came on board in 2007, and plan to stick around only for a few more issues. ‘The idea is keep it young and avoid creative dynasties,†Joffe-Walt says. ‘For me it’s a privilege to come, experiment with inventive magazine-making for a few years, and …†Midway through his punctuating shrug, Bedoni cuts in: ‘I think it’s important to let new creative people give their contribution at any time.â€
The pair conducted a workshop with a group of photography students at the Market Photo Workshop, where spreads of the latest Colors issue are being exhibited in the gallery space. John Fleetwood, the director of the Market Photo Workshop, says he is ‘keen to work with Colors because they’ve been able to stir. They’ve been able to offer some controversial issues around how media works with reality — It seems a lot of new magazines are interested in lifestyle and are trying to create middle-class values. It is important for us, at some level, to start questioning those conventions.â€
For Bedoni and Joffe-Walt, their time in South Africa is ‘not so much an attempt to promote our magazine, but rather an attempt to encourage conceptual ways of approaching media, and creative ways of producing itâ€.