Magazines were being published in the United States by the 1740s; they became a popular medium in the nineteenth century, when they featured woodcut and lithographic illustrations as well as articles, advertisements, and serialized fiction. The invention, in the 1880s, of the halftone process for reproducing photographs stimulated the birth of the modern magazine. The genre reached maturity in the twentieth century with picture-driven periodicals like Vogue, Harper's Bazaar, and Life. Alexey Brodovitch, art director at Bazaar from 1934 to 1958, combined expressive typography with full-bleed images created by vanguard photographers.

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