This kind of meaningful pairing works perfectly well just as visual entertainment, but you can take it further, using the ideas behind photographs, not just their surface form. There’s a long history of this, and indeed, magazine editors in the 1930s began using it to make political points in the increasing chaos of Europe. Stephan Lorant, first editor of Picture Post, caused uproar by juxtaposing British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain with a dopy looking Andean llama. Harold Evans, editor of The Sunday Times for many years, and founder of Conde Nast Traveler, had strong views about the effectiveness of all this, which he called coupling: “There is nothing particularly clever about the design or the underlying idea.” When it works, he said, “It is forceful because it is simple.” Evans also…
