Introducing the Shinnterviews, in which I interrogate myself on a variety of topics

What prompted this series of blog posts?

I recently noticed several interviews (in print) with intriguing formats, suggesting a serendipity worth pursuing. I began to think about the concept of interviewing, and where it stood in my mind, and which examples I remembered as noteworthy, and what existed in the Shinnstitute library.

The arrangement of repeated question and answer, person to person, likely originated in the early days of homo sapiens, before becoming stiffly formalized by Plato in the Socratic Dialogues 2400 years ago, and finding its modern, journalistic form in the late 19th century. Beyond the discovery of facts, interviews can be, by dint of revealing the composite personality of a person’s thoughts, a far more civilized conception of identity than the cesspool of data wielded by algorithms. Employment applications and police interrogation are variants, somewhat invasive. As a genre that continues to adapt to the evolution of media in diverse interpretations, the interview is a lively and engaging phenomenon.

But what turned an interest into a project about yourself?

I’ll get to that. But first, prior to the project, research and acquisition. There’s a filing cabinet in my head where I store curiosities that I encounter, strange kinds of novelty which illuminate and give shape to vague imaginings and groping for meaning, serving as anchor points to theories, techniques and taste—forming emergent semantic networks and becoming raw material for work in different media. The stuff of themes.

“What would you like me to write in your album?” Photographer Félix Nadar invents the photo-interview, his subject: giant of chemistry Michel-Eugène Chevreul, who had just turned 100. Published in the Journal Illustré, 5th September, 1886. Nadar is in the photos, which were taken by his son Paul. The makeshift studio, with its junky furniture, scrunched up carpet and tacky backdrop sheet, is delightfully bohemian—and is that a one-piece, rational-dress suit Nadar is wearing? And black gloves?!

How do you recognize what might be useful?

It’s something extraordinary that resonates with my interests. Nadar’s interview with Chevreul caught my fancy, as most of the photographer’s portraits are of a single person, and yet here he is too, in a sequence of shots taken by his brother Paul, conversing with an impish centenarian for the pages of a magazine, with captions. Now that’s creative direction! Remarkable as the invention of the photo-interview, Nadar’s sequence of images also bears comparison with early comic strips (Hoffmann, Busch) and their predecessors (Bayeux, Giotto, Hogarth) and proto-cinema (lantern shows and chronophotography, e.g. Muybridge). Picture stories.

I’m impressed by outlandish exemplars of media genres, and by glitches in the matrix that show glimpses of its structure, for comparison with similar oddities. Each becomes a memory, a jigsaw piece in a puzzle for which I have only the vaguest idea of the whole, and I’m making it up on the fly. Like mathematics as a representation of reality, the squiggly lines that define each curious piece are both discovery and invention. There’s intuition in the discovery, art in the invention.

So, a collection of curiosities?

Yes. Along with Nadar-Chevreul, into the file marked “the ontology of interviews as media tools that construct social intelligence” I popped a photo of Robert Fulford and William Ronald interviewing one another in 1971, microphones in hand, which I came across while designing Jane Lind’s biography of Joyce Wieland in 2001. Funnily enough, I’ve recently acquired a couple of books by Fulford at thrift stores, and then he died, all of which helped the 2001 memory resurface, smacking of significance. Remembering is collecting: you’d never remember anything if you didn’t tag it, placing it somewhere in the palace of memory, with each tag accumulating content and presto, there’s a collection, a museum, a warehouse in your mind. A filing cabinet indeed: hundreds of years ago certain treasure troves of the wealthy were nascent museums, eclectic collections of bizarre random objects—yet to be neatly categorized—which were known as “cabinets of curiosities,” the cabinet being either a room or a case where the artefacts were kept and displayed.

Columnist Robert Fulford and artist William Ronald interview one another at the opening of Joyce Wieland’s True Patriot Love, at the National Gallery of Canada in 1971. Photo: Arnold Matthews.

What did the reflexivity of this image reveal?

Interview as art form. And critically, the mirroring suggested that one might interview oneself. I am in fact an old hand at writing about myself—in the third person—for the pages of the Shinntype site, so there’s a motive for this project, a fresh method of autobiography. As an exercise in publicity, Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine appropriated the periodical format as an artistic medium, engaging the subject matter of celebrity and branding. I can relate to that.

Andy Warhol’s Interview, July 1973. 11½”x 15”. Printed on newsprint, the design is pointedly un-polished—more art than graphic design—with display type in a blown up, distressed typewriter font (fixed width, no kerning) and body text in Times Roman, exploiting its default quality.

What do you hope to learn about yourself?

Curiosity is its own reward. I enjoy doing research and the clarity acquired in trying to capture and communicate ideas in words, to oneself and others. The Shinnterviews are also self-promotion, of course. My generation of artists has been keen to self-mythologize, creating serial images of ourselves role-playing. Cindy Sherman, Urs Lüthi, David Bowie, to name a few.

The role-playing meme. 12” album cover by Barney Bubbles for Stiff Records, London, 1978. While Nick Lowe’s music lovingly satirizes several kinds of pop music, Bubbles’ design keeps pace, on the same vibe as chameleon David Bowie. The tightly set Helvetica Medium is similar to the all-caps Standard Medium appearing on the cover of Bowie’s Station to Station in 1976.

People interviewing themselves, in patently disguised characterizations, is a social media trope in short-form videos. Why not videos for you?

Yes, my socials guru Zoë Shinn wants to film the Shinnterviews for YouTube and TikTok and I might comply, but blog essay just seems right, a purely literary confection, an exercise written to be read, not a transcription of a live event or a script for performance. The distinction registered in an incident perhaps 20 years ago in Boston or New York, involving a marquee baseball player who was always bitching about his treatment by a particular newspaper. To shut him up, they published an exact transcription of a recorded interview with him, neglecting to edit out the usual clutter of ums, uhs, likes and right?s, thereby leaving the impression he was a complete idiot.

Purely literary? Won’t the interviews be illustrated, like all your previous blog posts?

Of course, combining words and images is my thing.

Why a series?

Because of a recent interview of Ketanji Brown Jackson in The New York Times Book Review. She’s an associate justice of the US Supreme Court, a lawyer by profession, but only one of the questions mentioned law. And I wondered, hmmm, how would I answer those generic questions—“What book had the greatest impact on you?” and so on. And I thought, I’ve been interviewed about type design, but I have many interests, everybody does, nobody should be pinned down in a one-dimensional identity. Embrace your hyphenation! I’ll add that my socials content is organized around several thematic series, “This is one of my favourite hats,” for instance, so multi-faceted series are top-of-mind.

The New York Times Book Review, 15th September, 2024. Illustration by Rebecca Clarke. Printed on newsprint, 11”x 12”. The fonts are the paper’s custom version of Cheltenham.

Have you been well interviewed?

The best was by the late Jan Middendorp for a MyFonts promotional campaign, Creative Characters. He asked, by email, whether I would participate and could he send me the questions? By chance, we would both be attending the TypeCon conference soon and as we’d often get together for a drink at such events I suggested he record the piece at a bar, for the sake of immediacy (and conveniently excusing myself the chore of writing and typing). So record it he did, at a sidewalk cafe in Buffalo, and edited out all the ums and uhs.

Creative Characters, designed by Nick Sherman, layout by Antony Noel, 2010. Page size 8½”x 11”.

With that experience I realized that there are many ways to conduct an interview for literary publication: by phone or videophone, by audio recording or writing, by email or in person—and the finished result, once edited, gives precious little indication of its genesis. Clearly, the format has possibilities for tinkering!

And what will be the topic of the first Shinnterview proper?

I haven’t decided yet. Perhaps Books, or Pro Bono Work, or Squash. ●