New Yorker Covers, Brought to Life!
In the history of a hundred years of The New YorkerThe photograph appeared on the cover exactly twice. For the seventy-fifth anniversary of the magazine in 2000, the portrait painter William Wegman released one of his Weimaraners as Eustace Tilley, our Dandyish mascot, originally drawn by Rea Irvin. (The butterfly that canine Eustace studies through its monocle also has a dog’s head.) But no human broke the barrier until last month, when Cindy Sherman’s image of herself as an Eustace covered a special number on the culture industry. Otherwise, what distinguishes New York Covers is the imaginative scope of the pen and the brush: political metaphors (Lady Liberty walks on a tightrope), Street Streets of Envantageist New York, cats of reverie. Each week comes a work of art.
But what happens if these images could come to life, like the statue of Pygmalion? For New Yorkers Centenary, the magazine asked six photographers to reinterpret the covers of our archives as portraits of flesh and blood, with familiar faces. The role of Eustace took place, this time, in Spike Lee, who exchanged the classic monocle for a film camera. After all, isn’t Eustace a kind of filmmaker, zooming in for an extreme close-up of the butterfly? The artist Awol Erizku, known to transform the manet and vermeer paintings into a contemporary black portrait, posed Lee under a golden basketball net. Rea Irvin, meet the ultimate fan of Knicks.
The covers of the age of jazz contain a glamorous mystic that turned out to be particularly attractive. Marilyn Minter adapted the image of Barbara Shermund in 1925 of a woman in the shape of a goddess in earrings in grape cluster; Minter shot actor Sadie through the glass, creating a dream mist. Julian de Miskey’s illustration of a drink of the drinking of cigarettes smoking smoking in hats and high -level pearls, from 1930 – What great depression? – was interpreted for a new era of glitter and unhappiness of Alex Prager, featuring the actor and musician Sophie Thatcher and his identical twin, the artist Ellie Thecher. And the representation of Stanley W. Reynolds in 1926 of a Canoe Canon with his daughter struck the Schorr necklace as resonant at a time of renewed discrimination against members of the Trans service. In Schorr’s photography, the duo, played by Julia Garner and Cole Escola, is more ambiguous and more sex, projecting an affectionate challenge. (An additional connection: Garner’s father, artist Thomas Garner, illustrated for The New Yorker.)
Jump a few decades. Charles Saxon, a frequent contributor to New York The covers from 1959 to the end of the 1980s tended to attract assured businessmen, but in 1974, when he was in the fifties, he returned a group of young Bohemiens with a bell, perched at the base of a mast as if he posed for a group photo. (You can almost feel the pot and patchouli oil.) To recreate the image, Ryan McGinley photographed friends, including the actor counter-cultural Julio Torres, in the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, by observing them less as curiosities than peers. And Camila Falquez, whose subjects included Zendaya and Kamala Harris, shot the Oscar-winning artist Ariana Debose as a demanding woman with a magnifying glass attracted by Lorenzo Mattotti in 1999. Consider them as an elaborate disguise game, a century and a change in the model.
–Michael Schulman
