White space has weight.

Alexey Brodovitch was art director of Harper’s Bazaar from 1934 to 1958. Against the crowded magazines of his day he chose more white space, larger photographs and fewer words, and he taught a generation of photographers and designers, Richard Avedon among them.

This cover, from September 1945, marks the end of the war with a single word, Victory, brushed in blue across the page. Only the masthead keeps to a structure, so the plate rules just two lines: the left edge of the BAZAAR logotype and the line it sits on.

Brodovitch treated empty space as a material with as much force as type or image. A wide margin beside a photograph slows the reader and makes the picture count. His pages were asymmetric and seldom at rest, and that tension was the point.