Twenty years of a magazine that has changed everything – Liberation

Some press titles run after their time. Others tell it, from the heart of the storm. Rarer are those who dare to get ahead of it, provoke it, manhandle it. By refusing to choose between art, music, fashion, cinema and politics, the British magazine The Face has set the tone of the emerging 80s and announced that of the twenty-four years that will follow. Between May 1980 and May 2004 – a revival has been orchestrated since 2017 but by a different editorial team – the review will have unveiled these two decades when everything was gradually mixed, open, telescopé.

A frantic hybridization which will cross a decisive course with the democratization of the Internet in the early 2000s but which in May 1980, when the magazine released its first issue, is utopia. The Face It will realize it, not by the text but by the image: beyond the constant quality of its articles, it is through its countless shots that the review defined its time, offering photographers a place and a freedom hitherto unpublished in the English press, which will translate as well in fashion shoots as in portraits or reports.

To see these photos exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London in an exhibition entitled « Culture Shift » (« cultural tilting ») could have seemed a daring twenty years ago, when The Face published his latest issue and put the key under the door. Today, that ti