
Matt Henry: The King in The Language of Fantasy; The Enduring Appeal Of Americana (detail)
We explore the enduring appeal of Americana in Printed Pages
To celebrate the launch of the Autumn issue of Printed Pages, we’ll be giving you a taster of some of the articles all this week. Below you’ll find a short excerpt from our look at the enduring cultural appeal of Americana as well as a couple of images; for the full piece you can buy the latest Printed Pages here.
It’s difficult to overestimate the power of the movie industry as hawkers of Americana. Growing up in north Wales, the photographer Matt Henry spent every penny of his pocket money renting VHS films from the Post Office, and he was entranced by TV shows like The A-Team and Dukes of Hazzard.
“Edward Bernays comes to mind here; the American nephew of Freud and the godfather of public relations and propaganda. He used Freud’s ideas to establish a theory that the best way to sell products wasn’t actually to sell their virtues, but instead to link goods to people’s unconscious desires. The idea is that rationality isn’t the greatest motivating force, and there’s something about American film and television that exploits this. It expertly keys into our sexual, aggressive, irrational urges. It gets you rooting for the bad guy, the anti-hero, and draws you into receiving real pleasure from outcomes you wouldn’t generally consider moral.
“It’s at the heart of many a storyline of the rebel, the outsider, the lone man and his gun refusing to compromise with the world. Fierce individualism and power; it’s not moral but it’s overtly sexual and ally sex to the Ford Mustang, or the baseball hat, or the American diner, and you begin to see behind this iconography.”

Carl Partridge: Americana in The Language of Fantasy; The Enduring Appeal Of Americana

Pete Gamlen: Scout in The Language of Fantasy; The Enduring Appeal Of Americana

Matt Henry: The King in The Language of Fantasy; The Enduring Appeal Of Americana

- Nazif Lopulissa rethinks the shapes and forms of the children’s playground
- Egg is an animation about attempting – and failing – to take control of something you are afraid of
- Why creatives should take the election advantage
- Adrienne Law on making something digital feel physical
- Kyuho Kim imagines the shapes of words in his inventive design practice
- Stomping boots and pouting lips, Taylor Silk’s woven women are icons of female sexuality
- “We want to challenge and disturb the audience”: meet graphic design studio Alliage
- Matt Willey leaves The New York Times Magazine and joins Pentagram
- Ikki Kobayashi’s new series investigates the tension between shapes and negative space
- “Perfectly beautiful things don’t attract me”: Heesun Seo on her nontraditional practice
- The Pantone Colour of the Year 2020 makes a statement about peace and communication
- Moleskine’s digital notebook and a visual inventory of Earth win Apple's Apps of the Year