In 1976 Northwestern Hospital placed an ad in a Chicago newspaper announcing the opening of two new medical facilities. Every copy of that advertisement-- except mine-- has now been used to line bird cages, wrap dead fish or fill garbage dumps. That leaves me as the only person left to praise its evanescent poetry.
Northwestern hired illustrator Franklin McMahon to humanize the mission of the hospital for a general newspaper audience:
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Look at the lovely, graceful way McMahon portrayed the grief of families in the waiting room:
Look at how beautifully he portrayed the architecture:
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McMahon made complex medical equipment less foreboding and more interesting.
Today an advertiser would use photographs or (horrors!) photo-illustration to handle this mission.
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| Northwestern Memorial Hospital in photograph (above) and illustration (below) |
6 comments:
These are quite humanizing indeed. Also a little humorizing. Which maybe isn't so appropriate for the subject.
It actually makes sense. There's a truism in health and mortuary services where you want to attract young clients because they have less chance of actually using them, and have a longer expected paying lifetime.
McMann was a great talent. Today illustrators would draw grief with a simplistic picture of a face crying.
JSL
Dr. Weir, after having torn out his own eyes and set his ship towards the heart of hell, pretty much sums up the telos of photography in the movie Event Horizon:
"Where we're going, we won't need eyes to see."
Any drawing tautologically trumps any photograph as far as humanization of and by the subject is concerned.
The most wonderful thing is that they are in black and white. I also love the lines and the distorted perspectives (I don't really know what to call them). I didn't know MacMahon and I'm going to have to research more about his art
Having worked in ORs in the mid 70s, I have to say the details, the equipment, the focus of the nurses, techs and doctors, overhead lights, etc. is rendered with phenomenal accuracy. No photograph could be so vivid. Remarkable!
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