Hardcover. NY, Thames & Hudson;, 1st, 2009, Book: Very Good, Dust Jacket: Very Good, Hardcover in a bright, unclipped dust jacket. The best pages from the sensational photo magazine published in France in the 1920s and 1930s. Established in Paris in 1928, VU combined stunning photography with dynamic layouts and first-rate reporting, creating a revolution in journalism and setting the stage for future photo magazines like Life, Stern, and Paris Match. For a weekly magazine that only published 665 issues (21 March 1928 -- 5 June 1940) VU left behind a remarkable legacy as revealed in these pages. There are eight main chapters: Page layouts; Faces; Photo stories; Photomontages; The rise of Hitler; Sensation and spectacle; Image innovations; Covers and each is crammed with spreads and covers from the magazine and lots of them are big enough to read the stories and captions (assuming you know French). VU was created by publisher Lucien Vogel with editor Carlo Rim and art editor Alexander Liberman (who became US Vogue's art editor and later creative director of Conde Nast) as a general interest picture weekly, some years before Life and Look in the US and Picture Post in Britain. They all took advantage of developing technologies of the day like wire transmission of photos and rotogravure printing. VU was the first though to use photos in a very creative way, especially with cover montages created by Liberman, no doubt influenced by Russian magazines of the twenties designed Rodchenko, Tellingater, Lissitzky and Stepanova.
