This post is part of an ongoing series featuring recently cataloged items from the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library.
Size matters! was the motto that Wilhelm Moser and David Culby took quite seriously when creating The Manipulator in Dusseldorf in the 1980s. This art magazine is an impressive 70 cm long by 50 cm wide and marks the heyday of the photographic press before digital images and Photoshop. It became a trailblazer for other extra-large photographic publications. The Manipulator would take images and blow them up to extremely large sizes, in either black and white or color, and combine them with text focusing on film, fashion, art and design, architecture and often ethical and historical subjects. This type of independent publishing carried on the tradition of Andy Warhol’s Interview from the 1970s which focused on celebrity and popular culture.
This particular issue featuring our friend the dog is no.19 and displays the variety of content one would find within the magazine. You can see the larger than life advertising with this Moschino ad which was part of a campaign that Moschino, a high-end fashion house, ran mocking the elite snobbery or “fashion system.” 
Franco Moschino was a designer that liked to challenge the fashion world and believed that it was a creative outlet meant to be fun and playful. This type of advertising as art was a very new concept at the time.
Then you turn the page and are faced with these amazing reproductions from the French newspaper Le Petit Journal. Both images have been blow up to the fill the full 70 x 50 cm pages. And both people are being spectacularly attacked by tigers and an octopus respectively. I’d say humans 0, animal kindgom 2.
They published a total of 29 issues and the covers can be seen as a kind of graphic anthology of the 1980s and have become somewhat of a collector’s item. This is the only issue we found in the Ludlow-Santo Domingo collection and Harvard has no other holdings or issues of the Manipulator.
The Manipulator. [Düsseldorf] ;[New York, N.Y.] / Wilhelm Moser and David Culby can be found in the Fine Arts Library collection.
Thanks to Alison Harris, Santo Domingo Project Manager, for contributing this post.
