Jessica Helfand

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Typographic Oddity No. 2: Spaceship Gothic

An upcoming auction of space memorabilia at Swann Galleries features a number of unusual specimens of paper ephemera which have miraculously survived the last half-century of American (and Soviet) space exploration. Who designed them? …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Blanket Statements

Psalm 23 Quilt, Lena MooreAn exhibit currently on view in New York at the American Folk Art Museum explores the visual texture of language through a selection of approximately twenty quilts made by women over the last 150 years. Here, …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The DNA of AND: Ampersand as Myth and Metaphor

From corporate rhetoric to consumer cliché to faux finishes and desktop veneer, truth has gone from being a steadfast principle to a silly posture. Once the stuff of morals and fables, its presence in everyday life has become an …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Annals of Typographic Oddity: Mourning Becomes Helvetica

It isn't often that The New York Times runs a 6-column headline on the front page. This kind of editorial real estate is typically reserved for something cataclysmic — a coup d'etat, for instance — and looks goofy and …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Regarding the Photography of Others

In an interview published in yesterday's Guardian, David Hockney makes a case for the implausibility of photographic truth: asserting that photography is as fictional as painting, his argument is an odd sort of inversion of Susan Sontag's …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Crisis of Intent

Victor Schrager's photographs currently on view at Edwynn Houk Gallery in New York are dream-like and unsettling: richly saturated, they're a cross between the urban drama of a Hugh Ferris drawing and the sobering stillness of a Gerhard …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

You're Going to Hollywood, Baby

Jessica Helfand|Essays

The Span of Casual Vision

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Mind the Light, Light the Mind

I was driving in the car recently when one of my children asked me to explain Quakerism. (A propos of what, now, I can't recall, though a similarly unprovoked opening conversational gambit came several days earlier, when the same child …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

A Blog Poem, Part I

Designers DevelopDistinctive DementiaDenying Dear Debts Due Descendants now Dead;Doubt and Denial,(Dada? Or de Stijl?)Design Does DefileDamned Discourse, instead.

Jessica Helfand|Essays

Sign Language: Endangered Species or Utopian Uprising?

Many of my students have, over the years, considered the street writ large as a kind of flexible, experimental canvas. Their sources — and here I would include everything from Aaron Siskind to Gabriel Orozco — inform work in …

Jessica Helfand|Essays

On Visual Empathy

In a world besieged by unpredictable atrocities, don’t we all feel a little emotionally raw? Two recent articles in suggest that visual empathy may more critical to a productive imagination than we thought.