Harpers Bazaar is very photo heavy publication. Since they are a fashion and beauty magazine, the photographs are essential and are used both to describe information and also to display clothing, accessories, and products. It is vital to HB because a part of their revenue is getting readers to purchase items featured in the magazine and receiving a commission from those purchases.
Harper’s Bazaar loves to take wide shots that show the models whole body, likely because they want to display the entirety of garment. So almost all photos on the fashion spreads show the model from head to toe. This magazine soley uses photography and has a well staffed photo team as well as using freelance photographers. Every page has a photo, even the feature articles have at least one photo per page. HB rarely uses just black and white photography, because color is such a key element to their design, especially considering that they don’t incorporate color in their section fronts, heds, or deks. The pages with one photo typically have one full bleed image that has text over it, HB likes to put text over images only when its full bleed, while articles that are photo heavy like the News and Updates sections have smaller, oftentimes collaged images and the text is standalone. They also use a lot of commercial images for photography of beauty and skincare products. They also take images that were used in runway shows to display certain trends or looks that they want to include, but can’t/don’t want to photograph themselves. They tend to prefer to use rectangular images over circles, but they also like using the silhouette of an image. They also may overlap slightly, but usually HB uses whitespace in between images.
The photographs in HB tend to be active mode and they are only superimposed onto one another when they are for beauty or fashion spreads with multiple pieces of content. HB makes photography the focal point because they use 3 fonts throughout the magazine from issue to issue. The content that is made is also displayed around the photography, which is why I think HB thinks of photography before anything else. Here they used silhouettes to display the accessories, adn the photos are the main focus. In these images the photos are tight shots.
As for illustrations and graphics, I could not find any example of any illustrations or graphics of any kind for Harpers Bazaar in recent issues. They rely heavily on playing with typography, color, and space, in addition to their photography, for the creative direction.
