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Sandy Kossin on his Bay of Pigs series: "Life magazine has resources... no one else can match."

Part 2 of Herbert Rogoff's 1969 interview with Sanford Kossin from American Artist magazine...

HR: In 1963, I believe, you did the illustrations for the Bay of Pigs story in Life magazine. How did you go about doing that job? What research was involved?

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SK: Happily, that job was for Life magazine, and Life has resources that probably no one else can match. They have a picture file second to none. I worked with a Cuban who was an explosives expert and had been part of the invasion. But prior to that, I met many times with the editors and art directors to iron out the mechanical problems: what to show and how many drawings to show it.

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SK: So when we finally decided on the nineteen spreads, we knew pretty well what each picture would depict. After that, it was a matter of making sketches that were appropriate for the page. My compositions were based on the pictures that preceded them. It was one step at a time. The opening spread dictated the next step, and so on.

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SK: Finally, I had to pose models in the attitudes that were necessary for each picture.

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SK: Research for the technical elements, the guns, the tanks, the airplanes...

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... and even the terrain on which the battle was fought...

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... was provided by the magazine. It then became a matter of creating the types,

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the people in their roles,

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... and trying to recreate the atmosphere of the battle.

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* Continued tomorrow

* Thanks to Tom Watson for providing many of today's scans.

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