Visualizing the World, Visualizing Change

In 1939, Otto Neurath's Modern Man in the Making was released by Alfred A. Knopf. Neurath was director of the International Foundation of Visual Information and used the Isotype (International System of Typographic Picture Education) system to "teach through the eye." A recent article describes Modern Man in the Making as a "pictorial statistical history of human technological adaptation and social cooperation [that] addressed a modern audience searching for optimistic narratives amid an economically, politically, and socially volatile era." The book is a classic, and for someone like me who veers toward arguments made in a combination of words and images, it is a book I should probably have — at the very least, I should know more about it.Although it was released as a trade book, can be found cheaply in b/w reprints, and is freely available on the Internet Archive, first editions of Modern Man in the Making go for hundreds and thousands of dollars. This is one of those books that screams out for a high-quality facsimile edition — and it will be getting that treatment early next year, courtesy of Lars Müller Publishers. The timing is curious, though, as Lars Müller just released Joy and Fear, in which Theo Deutinger brings the subjects and visual techniques of Neurath's magnum opus into the 21st century. Although Deutinger writes that his book "enters in dialogue" with Neurath's book, I couldn't help thinking that the two books side by side would heighten the differences and similarities, the constants and changes between the 1930s and the 2020s. Alas, I'll have to wait until February to do that.Joy and Fear is not the first book by Theo Deutinger published by Lars Müller. That was Handbook of Tyranny, which was published in 2018 and was recently released in an updated, expanded edition. I didn't see it upon its initial release, though I did catch Deutinger's display of the book's illustrations — the walls, fences, and other means of controlling human behavior in cities — in actual objects: plants, railings, barbed wire, a prison jumpsuit and other pieces of the "routine cruelties of the twenty-first century" at the Storefront for Art and Architecture. That 2019 exhibition prompted me to get the book and then write a review: "The straightforward illustrations look like they could have been pulled from Architectural Graphic Standards, making the book read at times like an actual handbook for tyrannical dictators." Deutinger's "detailed non-fictional graphic illustrations," as described by the publisher, also owe a debt to Neurath, as evinced by the publication of Joy and Fear. People who already own the first edition of Handbook of Tyranny won't find it necessary to buy the update, given that the changes amount to just eight new pages and consist mainly of some new paragraphs here and there, and the reordering of charts and graphics to reflect the state of the world five years later. Still, I appreciated the fact Deutinger went to the effort of an update, doing something that was de rigueur in books decades ago but is now rare, almost exclusively the province of the internet, which can be updated in close to real time. But Deutinger's illustrations — almost subversive in their dryness — are appropriate to the pages of a book; I feel like they would lose something on the screen, even though the changes impacting his illustrations happen at a clip much faster than in half-decade intervals.Spread from Handbook of Tyranny (Expanded Edition) by Theo Deutinger, published by Lars Múller Publishers, June 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop)In between Handbook of Tyranny and Joy and Fear, Deutinger and Lars Müller put out Ultimate Atlas: Logbook of Spaceship Earth, a book that uses lines — and nothing else — "to create a total portrait of the planet." No wonder one review calls it "the ultimate simplification of reality." I haven't seen that book, but visually it seems that Joy and Fear strikes a balance between the highly detailed illustrations of Tyranny and the minimalism of Ultimate Atlas, as if Neurath's Isotype cannot be improved upon in describing the state of the world over time. As described above, Deutinger's book "dialogues" with Neurath's nearly century-old book. It does this by extending the timeline to the present and adjusting some data visualization from the original; the latter updates are highlighted with the icon of a person holding up a sign. What does the book reveal about the modern world? Clearly, yet unfortunately and not surprisingly, that progress is being made by the few, not the many: geographically, demographically, politically, economically, etc.Spread from Joy and Fear: An Illustrated Report on Modernity by Theo Deutinger, published by Lars Múller Publishers, September 2023 (Amazon / Bookshop)The spread above can serve to illustrate how the book works. The red, blue, and black chart on the left shows household ownership of amenities in the USA, from 1910 to 2020, including such items as computers,