Be warned: This article will run rough-shod over typographic history

Although Berlin Sans is a new, modern and digital face, it is a re-imagining of a much earlier design, Negro, by a German emigré to New York, Lucian Bernhard. As a form of shorthand, and to reflect the modern availability of Berlin Sans, this article will run rough-shod over typographic history by describing the biographical details of Negro’s designer, as the progenitor of the modern font, whose details will in turn be discussed. It is after all, due to Lucian Bernhard that the font ever came about. It will also refer to both fonts as Berlin Sans as the glyph shapes are so alike. Once again, this is due to the fact that to purchase the font for digital use, you would be seeking Berlin Sans.

Equally so, in discussing Lucian Bernhard, The Inquisition does not mean to belittle David Berlow’s work on this beautiful font. Simply put, the genus for this lettering can be traced back to Bernhard’s design output and its lettering forms. That is the story to be told.

Please Note

Other early twentieth century German printers’ jobbing fonts have been digitised. See Erik Spiekermann’s Berliner Grotesk as an alternative, with perhaps more personality but less flexibility.

Lucian Bernhard's very stylish, stacked signature

Lucian Bernhard, Type Designer

Lucian Bernhard (1883 – 1972) was a self-taught graphic artist, painter, type- and industrial-designer. He was born as Emil Kahn. Throughout his life he disliked speaking of the past, even to his children, meaning there is much speculation about his exact biographical details. It seems the most plausible reasons for the name change was either a reaction against his father or a prescient move in the face of growing anti-semitism in Germany.

During the First World War Bernhard worked for the German government in the production of propagandistic artworks.

Lucian Bernhard's winning Priester poster

Bernhard’s breakthrough moment came when he entered a competition to design a promotion for Priester matches. The money offered was very little, but times were tight and he had a name to make for himself. In the end he won not just the competition but also ongoing work from the marketing company who oversaw the competition.

Bernhard’s initial Priester design was a complex Jugendstil piece; Germany’s take on Art Nouveau, and the bleeding edge style of the time. At a friend’s suggestion he started to simplify the over-wrought work, initiating a process he knew as “addition by subtraction”.

The judges decided that the final work, a gaudily coloured writing of the company name and two accompanying twigs of matches was heinous. They threw it in the bin and moved on. Luckily for Bernhard, and indeed twentieth century design more generally, one of the executives from the marketing firm who was sent to oversee the competition saw the binning taking place. He rushed over, retrieved the artwork and admonished the judges by proclaiming the winner to be found. While many thought this simple poster too stark, too modern, the executive’s vision changed German design.

The Priester story was later told by Bernhard himself, so it may well be apocryphal.

Lucian Bernhard's Informative Functionalist poster for Adler Typewriters

Lucian Bernhard's Informative Functionalist poster for Bosch Sparkplugs

Lucian Bernhard's Informative Functionalist poster for Ranniger Gloves

Lucian Bernhard's Informative Functionalist poster for Stiller Shoes

The train of his career was set in motion. This style became known as Informative Functionalism. The artworks became known as Sachplakat or “object-posters”. The influence of the orient, and in particular the iconic simplified and refined forms of Japanese woodcuts, is plain to see. The product was illustrated to look desirable and the message was a simple word association between the producer’s name and the aspirational image. This is a very similar conceptual approach to Apple’s today.

The new style became synonymous with Bernhard. His stylish, stacked logo can be seen inscribed on many of the posters. These were early days for the graphic design profession. Being relatively novel the producers could sign their work like fine artists.

The adoption of Informative Functionalism was echoed in the prevalence of Bernhard’s direct artful hand-lettering style throughout German design of the time. Foundries clamoured for these robust faces and a new career avenue opened for the designer. He went on to create an extensive list of diverse typeface designs:

• Bernhard Antiqua, 1911
• Bernhard Fraktur, 1912-22
• Bernhard Privat, 1919
• Bernhard Schonschrift, 1925-28
• Bernhard Handschrift, 1928
• Bernhard Fashion, 1929
• Bernhard Gothic, 1929-31
• Bernhard Negro, 1930
• Bernhard Lilli, 1930
• Bernhard Lucian, 1930
• Bernhard Tango, 1933
• Bernhard Moderna, 1933-38

A selection of fonts by Lucian Bernhard

In 1932 Bernhard upped sticks and moved to a USA that was not ready for him. His work was not well-received in a reprise of the German reticence from the early days of his career, it was felt to be too extreme, too harsh, in essence too modern. He began to move toward fine art. His paintings were very similar to Edward Hopper’s as he reacted to his new American life.

Catnap - painting by Lucian Bernhard

On the next page – the typeface’s origins and typographic details

Original content created by: The Inquisition

Henry Lartigue's photo of an ovoid wheel asks some difficult questions

Photography is generally taken as being an impartial truth. It is seen as having an inherent objectivity, as being a thing of documentary record. Photographs are used to settle legal disputes, rebut false claims and to prove or disprove rumours and theories.

But photography is not truth. It is only ever a partial truth, one taken from a single perspective. Even without retouching, a photograph can lie by omission and selection.

Disregarding photo manipulation, reworking and recomposing, all of which are now so much easier than ever before, let us consider photography’s truth. For what follows image photography only at its purest; the capture of a single, still image through a lens, a moment frozen in time through light radiation, chemical reactions and electronic impulses.

Falling Soldier by Robert Capa. Click to view larger example

Consider this photo, Falling Soldier by Robert Capa. It is popularly believed to be the first time a death in war was captured on a camera. In all probability, this is not true. Deaths were filmed before this point. It may not even be a death, it may only be the beginning of a slow agonising struggle the man, Federico Borrell Garcia, is destined to lose. The photo alone does not tell us. But the story goes that it is the first death on camera and most of us accept it.

“The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

Of course, Capa could simply have faked his Falling Soldier, as very many of varying degrees of credibility have alleged. Nonetheless, it is an image we are all familiar with, and therefore worth exploring. Most, if not all of us have the same instinctive reading of it. This is part of the reason the photo is so powerful. So, let us suppose the photo is to some extent factual and not staged.

Perspective

From our low vantage point we imagine a terrified man feeing for his life and about to jump down into the safety of the foxhole where we, the camera, his comrades shelter. But just as he reaches the lip of safety the bullet strikes and his escape is never to be successful.

Now imagine if the angle were different. Imagine if we saw him from a full-front position. At the bottom of the image is a rifle’s barrel pointing straight at him. He is charging at us and trying to kill us. The shot that hits his head saves us. He is our enemy.

Conversely, if we saw him from behind, he is still our enemy, This time however, we, or one of our comrades, has shot him in the back as he flees.

Assuming he is indeed fleeing, and we are viewing the action from the most truthful angle (if such a concept were even possible), how do we know who shot him? Up to this point we have only considered how the image’s angle may not be telling the whole story. But there is much more that the photo does not tell us.

We cannot see the direction he is running, nor can we even see where it takes place. We do not know the time of day,nor week, month or year. We have no idea of his previous actions, or those of any around him. The soldier floats alone in an indefinite narrative space. We cannot even describe what exactly has befallen him. We see the bullet glance his temple and blood spatter, but it does not come directly from behind. How do we know he was not shot by a comrade?

Quality

Originally it was widely thought that the plume from the man’s head was blood spattering. This throws a harsh light across one of photography’s limitations – the quality of reproduction. The original reproductions were in poor quality newsprint and pre-digital lithography.

The peculiar shape is in fact a tassel on his cap. This is clear on seeing a large clear print from the negative. In anything less than the clearest print, the eye is fooled into imagining blood spraying from a bullet strike. In fact, there is no blood visible at all in the photo. Although the viewer makes up their mind as to what they perceive, the truth of what is seen is not absolute.

It would even be possible to read the photo in a most ridiculous manner. A child seeing the photo, for example, may see a man throwing himself backwards in abandon, discarding his weapon.

In short, we come away from the photo poorly equipped to make an objective assessment, but having seen enough human trauma to have a subjective comprehension.

So, semiotically the picture is unclear, as much as any other. We only see what our experience teaches us to see. We see what we understand on a compassionate, human level. This may not be the signal that ought to be denoted.

So how do we know which of these stories is true? The photo does not tell, the photographer did. When it was submitted for use, Capa would have submitted an explanatory caption also, exactly because the image alone has no one, single and identifiable truth.

Robert Capa’s image sets the standard for discussions of photographic truth and the documentary merits of lens-captured imagery. Part of this stems from the suggestion it was faked, although the conversations on photography’s objectivity generally proceed on an tacit acceptance of the image’s reportage integrity. The image is primarily chosen for its serendipitous capture of a fact we are all faced with – our mortality. It is a matter we all must consider and as such it is an image that no-one can fail to connect with at some level.

Capa liked to see this fact differently, “The truth is the best picture, the best propaganda.”

Note on the Photographer

Capa was a storyteller, even referred to by his most zealous promoters as having been a sometime fabricator of images, staging events to service a story. In fact, Robert Capa did not even exist. He was invented. Eventually Endre Friedmann would become the story he had come up with. Friedmann and his girlfriend Gerda Pohorylle created a more marketable identity to appeal to picture editors and commissioners of photography.

None of this should detract from the fact that Capa was a bona fide great, straddling the divide between reportage and art. He was a genius possessed of unsurpassed ability to tell a whole story through a single image, a moment frozen in time, to explore what it means to be human.

Bibliography
Ethical Martini suggests Capa faked it
Wikipedia’s discussion of the photo
Slightly Out of Focus, Robert Capa, Modern Library, 2001 Edition
Robert Capa: The Definitive Collection, Phaidon, 2001
About Looking, John Berger, Bloomsbury, 1980
Nobel Lecture by Harold Pinter on Truth in Art
The Truth Claim, a discussion on photography
Truth in photography forms a major part of Susan Sontag’s writings
PBS on Capa

Original content created by: The Inquisition