Many years ago many of the camera manufacturers also had their own magazine. One of the less well known of these is Exakta Magazine, which highlighted the today equally obscure Exakta camera.

To set itself off from the rest, Exakta Magazine hired several of the top graphic designers in the country to style its pages. Earlier I shared two of these issues, one designed by Leo Lionni, the other by Alexey Brodovitch.

These names are all but unknown to the hobbyist photographer of today. I just searched the popular photo site DPReview for the word “Brodovitch” and found only about a dozen hits out of over forty-five million posts–despite Brodovitch’s association with so many of the greats of photography, including Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, and many others.

And it’s not just the hobbyists. Look through the top-ten lists from the various photo arts publications and, always with exceptions, the photobooks on these lists share a glazed-eye homogeneity of design, despite so many of them being conceived as book-centered projects before the first exposure was made.

I recently acquired a third issue from the early Exakta Magazine and I wanted to share it, too. This one is designed by Ernst Reichl. Another name well-known to book designers, unknown to all but a few photographers.