Love letters

Photographer Rowland Scherman's "Love letters", a kind of natural typeface:

He tells about it in the Typographica blog. Excerpt:

No one got paid. It was just a high-spirited valentine for the eye, but when I realized it might be the first photographic freestanding human typeface ever (it was), I tried for a while to make a coffee table-type book out of it. New York publishers were afraid that the pubes and the Z might offend someone. This was in 1975. Japanese publishers couldn’t do it either because of the pubic hair.

(via Swissmiss)

Comments

[Lunettes Rouges]

You might find this "Alphabet Concept" also interesting, although a bit more commercial, shall we say ?
http://lunettesrouges.blog.lemonde.fr/2006/01/16/2006_01_bernard_arn_van/

[BrunoG]

Indeed, I totally share your comments about the commercial smell of it. But then, this being Vanessa Beecroft, it reminds me of her accusing Maurizio Cattelan of plagiarism in 2005 (his upside-down cops vs her upside-down naked woman). One year later, she presents this Alphabet Concept for Louis Vuitton with such striking similarities to Scherman's Love Letters, which were made in 1975... Of course the question of inspiration and creativity and plagiarism in art is centuries old and will forever remain unresolved. As Cattelan himself once said, "was Warhol robbing Marilyn Monroe's identity when he painted her? And what was Cézanne doing? Robbing apples? In art, all you can do in the end is appropriate that which surrounds you. So it is never a robbery. At the most it is a loan. And unlike thieves, artists always give back the stolen goods".