The Face, nº 76, August 1986
“Taking his cue from Baudrillard, Dick Hebdige also mounted an attack on the hollowness of hyperreality, impugning the ludic form and content of The Face, a youth culture title launched by Nick Logan in 1980, out of the publishing house Wagadon, for which Neville Brody coined a distinctive graphic style beyween 1981 and 1986. In Hebdige’s telling criticism, The Face was the archetypal postmodern magazine, since it embodied the shift from a history based on the word and writing to one in which ‘Truth -in so far as it exists at all- is first and foremost pictured’. Furthermore, much like Baudrillard, he argued that hyperreality is often based on a nostalgic impulse through which ‘The past is played and replayed as an amusing range of styles, genres, signifying practices to be combined and recombined at will... Advertising -the eidos of the marketplace- is pressed into the very pores of The Face’.”
Paul Jobling. “Between words and images: simulation, deconstruction and postmodern photography”. In Postmodernism: style and subversion, 1970-1990, edited by Glenn Adamson and Jane Pavitt. London: Victoria & Albert, 2011 (p. 221)