I recognise Harry Rekas from the one clear photograph available of him when carrying out my pre-interview Internet stalk. He has that ‘boy who danced while the bombs fell around him’ look, refusing to ever stop smiling. Harry’s smile is hardwearing. Earned.
“Harry?” I ask. “How did you recognise me, was it the pink carnation?” He puts some coins into a parking meter on Smith Street, Fitzroy before we head out into the courtyard of La Niche Cafe. Harry rolls a cigarette.
“I work better with a prop,” he says. Harry, in his own words, has “been in a transit lounge waiting for the last five years”.
An itinerant creative, he has recently relaunched Large magazine as an A5 glossy tucked into in a brown paper bag: the bag stamped with an image quite unshrinking in its marking of new territory. Some may consider nothing visionary about a man proudly urinating, but for others it evokes a feeling of the way our wounded world works at times.
Harry Rekas is the backbone and brain of Large, a publication he has driven through various formats. What was once a pocket flipbook of Melbourne nightclub fliers, has evolved into the satirical mag it is today, shamelessly indulging the absurdity of extremes, permitting readers’ a perspective from opposite directions to what they might be used to.
It is a heady, though hysterical, mix of “pop, politics and porn”, as Harry likes to say. Harry is someone who understands that life isn’t always honest-to-goodness. He is well travelled and well battled. While he is a man fluent in Greek, French and English, and has shared offices in London and Athens, he has also kept the company of “guys with broken arms and swallows tattooed to their necks”. Starting out in advertising, Harry is the first to admit his attitude wasn’t the best as a young man.
“My temperament was shit to tell you the truth,” but he says this with that smile and I get the impression he is suggesting a particular behaviour, one that often aids an individual’s progress. Unlike a lot of people too afraid to be honest with themselves, who remain stuck in jobs and lives they hate, Harry decided on change early, and it proved inspirational. After living in France for a number of years he returned to Melbourne in the mid-nineties and established what was then a “little magazine called Large”.
Large was printing 70,000 copies a month for a while, before Harry returned to Europe again and found himself not only in London, but securing a deal with James Brown, enfant terrible of British publishing and editor of Loaded magazine. James Brown himself once said, “I’m fascinated by chaos. Order frightens me”. Brown must have identified a kindred courage in Harry and supported Large in the UK.
“They gave us computers, desk space and no strings attached. We’d just reconvene every three months and they’d see how we were going. They allowed us to plug into their infrastructure to a certain extent and it was ‘wow, this is an awesome deal.'”
In 2003, Large won “best cover” at the Consumer Magazine Design Awards. And now Large is back, in print on actual paper, ready to mount a challenge to a world maddening by the virtual / viral moment. “I like print, and I think because people have political and personal restraints and what I do is a little bit prickly … once you print something it potentially has more impact. It’s real, you know?”
Whether judged a sordid soapbox or a rare alter of honesty, Large is one of only a few uniquely transgressive publications. Harry and the new Large are out to contest the “gatekeepers” watch, perhaps even break down a gate or two.
You can buy Large magazine through selected newsagencies, bookshops and retailers or online at www.large.ac