Stylish Exposure Looking Around for More
When it began a little over a year ago, Exposure magazine was strictly a creature of Los Angeles, a little bimonthly in an oversize format with no ambitions beyond the city.
But that has changed with the current issue, which is being distributed nationally in about 90 cities as well as in Canada, Europe and Japan.
While the numbers involved are still small--a total of about 35,000 copies with 20,000 of those for this area--the increased distribution represents a major expansion of ambitions for Exposure, says publisher Henry M. Shea Jr., who graduated from USC in 1984 with a degree in public administration and “stumbled” into publishing after a planned career in Texas real estate evaporated.
Shea believes the magazine was able to sign a three-year contract with a national distributor because its blend of eye-catching photography, short profiles and articles about young musicians, actors and artists, fashion and the Los Angeles street scene has appeal well beyond the city limits.
But then Exposure has made a point of being noticed. Editor-in-chief Cavin Shorter, also a USC graduate, said that from the start the magazine has been sent to such strategic places as art galleries, advertising agencies, record companies, club owners and other haunts of the trend-conscious. In return, Exposure has attracted a fair share of local and national advertisers who help make the latest issue a thick 152 pages, compared to well under 100 pages in some earlier issues.
The result is a magazine that embraces undiscovered musicians, denizens of the social fringe and upscale consumer products, such as Camp Beverly Hills, Guess? and Benetton clothing and various brands of liquor.
Each issue generally is built around a theme--”Brits in Babylon” and “the ‘70s” to name a couple. The recent issue on the 1970s featured full-page photographs of such Me Decade landmarks as Richard Nixon, Patty Hearst, motorcycle river jumper and broken-bone expert Evel Knievel and film director Robert Altman, with brief updates on each. By far the funniest vignette was from Lance Loud who wrote his own recollection of what befell his family after it was made notorious by the landmark PBS documentary, “An American Family.”
“In 1970, television ate my family,” Loud wrote, noting that the documentary was “to home movies what Godzilla is to the garden-variety lizard.” He also ruefully commented, “The Andy Warhol prophecy of 15 minutes of fame for any and everyone blew up on our doorstep.”
But publisher Shea said Exposure, which bills itself as “the magazine for Los Angeles and beyond,” really jelled only with the current issue--with actor Mickey Rourke on the cover--which surveys artistic and other rebels such as novelist William S. Burroughs, a Los Angeles street gang, the Animal Liberation Front, a Hell’s Angels chapter president, actress Bette Davis and the band Guns N’ Roses. A section called Expose spotlights rising talent in performance art, video and music.
“This particular issue looks like a real magazine,” Shea said. “. . . It’s taken us about six issues to get our identity down.”
The issue’s most striking feature is the photography, Exposure’s strong point from the beginning. In addition to powerful portraits, the current issue contains a photo essay on runaway teen-agers in Los Angeles. In one photograph a group of teens slouches around a pair of candles in an abandoned house, the floor littered with potato-chip bags and beer cans.
Despite the leap to national distribution, the problem now, Shea said, is to find financial backing to consolidate Exposure’s presence in the national magazine marketplace. Although there have been tentative offers to buy the magazine, Shea said he has no intention of giving up control of Exposure, adding that he hopes to make the magazine a monthly in about a year.
Ms. Honors Six
“Sweet” Alice Harris of Watts and Anne Archer of Bel-Air are among the six women to be named Ms. magazine’s Women of the Year today at a breakfast in New York.
Harris, the mother of 11, was cited “for giving the children of Watts reason to hope and means to achieve.” The “50ish” grandmother runs Parents of Watts, an organization that sponsors programs for the homeless, emergency food aid, voter registration and health seminars as well as projects to help educate, train and employ young people.
In its announcement of Harris’ selection, the magazine reported: “As a welfare mother (then) with seven children, she joined Watts’ looters for two days during the ’65 rebellion. But she was also around to give advice when the architects and planners came to rebuild Watts after the riots.”
Ms. praised Harris as a mediator of gang disputes and benefactor of unwed mothers. An unwed mother who had her first child at 13, Harris was praised because “her dedicated work creates opportunity, health and harmony for neglected Angelenos.”
Archer, an actress perhaps best known for her role as the wife in the movie “Fatal Attraction,” was picked by the magazine “for her courageous public pro-choice advocacy at a time when the fight to control our bodies is becoming bitter and violent. Archer’s calm presence gives a deserved dignity to the struggle.”
The mother of two, Archer was praised by the magazine for public appearances at last year’s political conventions and for her support of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, which she now serves as national public advocacy chairperson.
Other women honored by the magazine are:
--Sarah Brady, wife of presidential press secretary James Brady, who was seriously wounded in the 1981 attempt on President Reagan’s life. Brady was selected “for taking up the cudgels against the powerful gun lobby and providing the power of personal experience as a catalyst for political action.”
--Environmental activist Marjory Stoneman Douglas, chosen for her 60-year fight to save Florida’s Everglades.
--Yolanda Serrano, a New York resident, picked “for waging war on AIDS among drug addicts and prostitutes.” Serrano, who distributes condoms and bleach to sterilize needles and teaches about the dangers of AIDS in the city’s South Bronx, was once called “the Avon Lady of AIDS,” the magazine said.
--Television personality Oprah Winfrey, whom the magazine singled out “for showing women that we can climb as high as we want to and inspiring us to take control of our resources and make them work for us and for a better world.” A double issue of Ms. containing features on the Women of the Year is due on newsstands today.
