Profile of a Curatorial Master: Yolanda Cuomo

6 minute read

Yolanda Cuomo is the curatorial voice behind some of the 20th century’s greatest photographic books. This year, alongside Melissa Harris, Cuomo is co-curating the LOOK3 Festival of the Photograph in Charlottesville, Va., June 13 – 15, 2013.

One word comes up again and again, like a shared mantra, when talking with Yolanda Cuomo, or when discussing Cuomo with people who know her: collaboration. Hardly surprising, perhaps, in light of the talent that, at one time or another, the 55-year-old art director and designer has worked with — including creative icons from Avedon and Sylvia Plachy to Twyla Tharp and Laurie Anderson. But one quickly gets the sense that, in Cuomo’s world, collaboration is not simply one way to approach a project; it’s the only way to approach a project.

As her longtime friend (“creative soulmate” might be a more apt description), Aperture Foundation editor-in-chief Melissa Harris, puts it: “Yolanda is simply one of the greatest people I know. She is so full of ideas, and our collaborations [on books, magazines, exhibitions] have been so fantastic because we always approach each project from an utterly fresh perspective. And we laugh,” she adds, making it clear that humor is an integral element of their long-time, enormously fruitful partnership. “We laugh a lot.”

The driving force behind the celebrated Yolanda Cuomo Studio, Yo (as all her friends and colleagues call her) has helped envision and produce some of the most striking and influential art and photography books of the past two decades, including Diane Arbus’ Revelations, Gilles Peress’ Farewell to Bosnia, Pre-Pop Warhol and scores of other titles.
(Incredibly, it was only within the last year, with New York at Night, that Cuomo got what she calls her “first spine.” She’d done 85 books through the years, she told LightBox, “but Norma Stevens and I published New York at Night in 2012 and, holy shit, there was my name on the spine!”).

A graduate of Cooper Union, Cuomo got her start in the publishing world as a junior designer at Condé Nast in the early 1980s. Under the mentorship of the legendary art director Marvin Israel, she not only was introduced to many of the people who would become part of her vast and cherished professional extended family — Plachy, Avedon, Peress, Nan Goldin and others — but also got her very first lessons, from a master, in the power of collaboration.

“Marvin was so brilliant,” Cuomo says, “and one of the key things I learned from him — by his example, not by his making a big deal out of it — was that bringing other peoples’ voices and sensibilities to a project can make it so much stronger and more wonderful than if only one person holds sway over everything.”

The reason Cuomo got the job at Condé Nast in the first place, meanwhile, is emblematic of another type of creativity altogether.

“I lied,” she says, her mischievous laugh all these years later suggesting that she still can’t believe it herself. “When I was interviewed [for the Condé job] I told them that of course I knew how to do mechanicals. Then I went right out and immediately called a friend and was like, ‘What’s a mechanical?'”

Regardless of how she got her foot in the door, Cuomo learned the ins and outs of the art and publishing worlds from the very best. A quick study, she was eventually asked to oversee a new project by the Village Voice, and in 1985 Yolanda Cuomo was named art director of the Voice’s short-lived, tremendously creative fashion magazine, Vue. There, she and her small staff were afforded the sort of creative freedom that, for anyone working in magazines today, must seem something from another, near-mythical age.

Cover and spreads from the September 1986 issue of Vue. Photographs by Amy Arbus.Courtesy of the Village Voice/Yolanda Cuomo Design

“It was total carte blanche,” Cuomo recalls. “We had to fill 32 pages that came out once a month. We sat in a room and just said to each other, ‘Okay, let’s call up people we love.'”

The names of those people they loved comprise something of a Who’s Who of talent of the era — each one of whom brought a unique sensibility to the pages of Vue. For one shoot, Sylvia Plachy photographed models posing in the trees of a New York cemetery. For another, Nan Goldin commissioned a pregnant bodybuilder friend to model lingerie in the East Village’s Russian baths. Phrases like “creative foment” seem to have been coined to describe exactly the sort of atmosphere that existed when Yolanda Cuomo was learning her chops.

The Voice shut down Vue after just a half-dozen issues, but its young staff, thrilled by what they’d accomplished together, was not ready to quit working as a team. With her assistant and two others, Cuomo found a small office space in Manhattan, and her design studio was born.

The studio’s first photo book was Unguided Tour, a collection of work by Sylvia Plachy.

“When we work together,” Plachy says of her collaborations with Cuomo, “we both have an intuitive sense about editing and designing. Yo is open to new things; she responds to things in the moment. She doesn’t force her point of view. Instead, it’s a free-flowing enjoyment of the evolution of the ideas, and moving toward something new and exciting.”

For Cuomo, inspiration can come from anywhere, from any time and from anyone. An old French book about the Eiffel Tower, for instance, discovered in a bookstore in Paris decades earlier, might influence the design of a photography book today. Closer to home, while making Paolo Pellegrin’s 2012 artist book — designed in a single, breakneck week — Cuomo found a visual muse in her assistant designer’s workspace.

“Bonnie [Briant] had a little color copy of a dog photo that she loved taped to her notebook on her desk, and I saw it and thought, ‘That is so beautiful.'”

A scan of the notebook — Scotch tape and scratches included — became the cover of the Pellegrin book. “That’s the way I like to work,” Cuomo says. “Spontaneously inventing.”

The fact that Cuomo has a full life outside of her work — a life that helps inform everything she does — speaks volumes about her ability to find balance in both the spontaneous and the thoroughly predictable. Living in Weehawken, New Jersey, Cuomo rides her bike every day from her home to the ferry, which she takes across the Hudson River to the West Side of Manhattan and her studio. At day’s end, she heads back across the river, to her “big old Victorian house,” her garden, her family — in other words, to a world that adds meaning and color to her vocation as an art director, designer and teacher.

In the end, that might be the greatest collaboration of them all: the way Yolanda Cuomo weaves family and work, leisure and labor, vision and vocation into a fully realized world of her own making.

Alissa Ambrose & Ben Cosgrove


See more of Cuomo’s work at Yolanda Cuomo Design.

Alissa Ambrose is a freelance writer and photo editor based in New York. Ben Cosgrove is the editor of LIFE.com.


Farewell to Bosnia, photos by Gilles Peress, 1994 "Many art directors have big egos and really want to impose their hand, their vision of a thing. But some art directors, like Yo, want to look at the world and are really not trying to interject themselves too much. Very often, a book is like a baby, you just have to try not to choke it. So Yolanda is wonderful to work with because she goes with you. She went with me and just let the book, the baby, breathe. And this is really what I appreciate about Yolanda: her great kindness and this great gentleness in approaching the process. She is putting the work, which is the book, ahead of her own ego." —Gilles Peress
Farewell to Bosnia, photos by Gilles Peress, 1994 "Many art directors have big egos and really want to impose their hand, their vision of a thing. But some art directors, like Yo, want to look at the world and are really not trying to interject themselves too much. Very often, a book is like a baby, you just have to try not to choke it. So Yolanda is wonderful to work with because she goes with you. She went with me and just let the book, the baby, breathe. And this is really what I appreciate about Yolanda: her great kindness and this great gentleness in approaching the process. She is putting the work, which is the book, ahead of her own ego." —Gilles Peress
Farewell to Bosnia, photos by Gilles Peress, 1994 "Many art directors have big egos and really want to impose their hand, their vision of a thing. But some art directors, like Yo, want to look at the world and are really not trying to interject themselves too much. Very often, a book is like a baby, you just have to try not to choke it. So Yolanda is wonderful to work with because she goes with you. She went with me and just let the book, the baby, breathe. And this is really what I appreciate about Yolanda: her great kindness and this great gentleness in approaching the process. She is putting the work, which is the book, ahead of her own ego."—Gilles Peress
Love and Lust, photos by Donna Ferrato, 2004 "My heart belongs to Yo Cuomo. Creating the book, Love 'n Lust with her was the pleasure of my life as a photographer. We laughed and cried about the stories some pictures told. Yes the subject sex can be hard core, but Yo took it to another level. What turns me on about Yo Cuomo is the way she packs a pound of revolution in every book she makes." —Donna Ferrato
Love and Lust, photos by Donna Ferrato, 2004 "My heart belongs to Yo Cuomo. Creating the book, Love 'n Lust with her was the pleasure of my life as a photographer. We laughed and cried about the stories some pictures told. Yes the subject sex can be hard core, but Yo took it to another level. What turns me on about Yo Cuomo is the way she packs a pound of revolution in every book she makes." —Donna Ferrato
New York September 11, Magnum Photos, 2001 "I don't know of another person who is as good a photo editor — a photo sequencer — as she is. Someone who can look at images and know instinctively which ones should be large, which ones should be small, which ones work. Which images work together or don't work together, how to pace and sequence a series of images and come up with an idea, a concept for something that is how to do a treatment of mini-images on a page at one time. We gathered that Friday and said 'well, what are we gonna do?' All the books we were working on just seemed irrelevant. When Giuliani said 'the best thing you can do to help New York is to get back to work,' we said, that's it. We'll get back to work by making a book about what happened. And I think the same thing happened for Yolanda. For us, it certainly gave us a reason to do something. Because no one felt like just doing books that a few weeks earlier seemed all important and now seemed very unimportant."—Daniel Power, CEO powerHouse Books
New York September 11, Magnum Photos, 2001 "I don't know of another person who is as good a photo editor — a photo sequencer — as she is. Someone who can look at images and know instinctively which ones should be large, which ones should be small, which ones work. Which images work together or don't work together, how to pace and sequence a series of images and come up with an idea, a concept for something that is how to do a treatment of mini-images on a page at one time. We gathered that Friday and said 'well, what are we gonna do?' All the books we were working on just seemed irrelevant. When Giuliani said 'the best thing you can do to help New York is to get back to work,' we said, that's it. We'll get back to work by making a book about what happened. And I think the same thing happened for Yolanda. For us, it certainly gave us a reason to do something. Because no one felt like just doing books that a few weeks earlier seemed all important and now seemed very unimportant."—Daniel Power, CEO powerHouse Books
Unguided Tour, photos by Sylvia Plachy, 1991 "She is open to new things and she repsonds to things in the moment. She doesn’t push her point of view. It’s a free-flowing enjoyment of the time. She just has this wonderful spirit and we both consider it more like playing together. It is like fun.” —Sylvia Plachy
Unguided Tour, photos by Sylvia Plachy, 1991 "She is open to new things and she repsonds to things in the moment. She doesn’t push her point of view. It’s a free-flowing enjoyment of the time. She just has this wonderful spirit and we both consider it more like playing together. It is like fun.” —Sylvia Plachy
Departures and Arrivals, photos by Charles Harbutt, 2012 "Yo has an uncanny ability to see a picture, going past subject matter, past content, past design to grasp the visceral thrust of an image. Watching her do a layout is like seeing a great jazz musician playing: trying this, trying that, laughing at a joke, then snatching a perfect pair and moving it to the end of her long work table to join other pairs and eventually to be melded into a riff, a sequence and the book." —Charles HarbuttYolanda Cuomo
Departures and Arrivals, photos by Charles Harbutt, 2012 "Yo has an uncanny ability to see a picture, going past subject matter, past content, past design to grasp the visceral thrust of an image. Watching her do a layout is like seeing a great jazz musician playing: trying this, trying that, laughing at a joke, then snatching a perfect pair and moving it to the end of her long work table to join other pairs and eventually to be melded into a riff, a sequence and the book." —Charles Harbutt
Paolo Pellegrin, 2012 “Yolanda is a wonderful person. A great editor with a deep understanding of photography and extraordinary sense of storytelling. I feel very privileged to work with her and her team.” —Paolo PellegrinYolanda Cuomo
Image: Paolo Pellegrin, 2012
Paolo Pellegrin, 2012 “Yolanda is a wonderful person. A great editor with a deep understanding of photography and extraordinary sense of storytelling. I feel very privileged to work with her and her team.” —Paolo PellegrinYolanda Cuomo
Image: Paolo Pellegrin, 2012
Paolo Pellegrin, 2012 “Yolanda is a wonderful person. A great editor with a deep understanding of photography and extraordinary sense of storytelling. I feel very privileged to work with her and her team.” —Paolo PellegrinYolanda Cuomo
Driftless, photos by Danny Wilcox Frazier, 2007 "Yo is world class in every way. Most importantly, it is Yo’s ability to feel the pulse within photographs that makes her so great to work with. Many people can see creativity in a series of images, but to feel photographs so closely that you can bring order to the emotion is a unique talent. Yolanda Cuomo brings that skill to the table." —Danny Wilcox Frazier Yolanda Cuomo
Image: Driftless, photos by Danny Wilcox Frazier, 2007
Driftless, photos by Danny Wilcox Frazier, 2007 "Yo is world class in every way. Most importantly, it is Yo’s ability to feel the pulse within photographs that makes her so great to work with. Many people can see creativity in a series of images, but to feel photographs so closely that you can bring order to the emotion is a unique talent. Yolanda Cuomo brings that skill to the table." —Danny Wilcox Frazier

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