New Yorker Covers, Brought to Life!

In the hundred-year history of The New Yorker, photography has appeared on the cover exactly twice. For the magazine’s seventy-fifth anniversary, in 2srcsrcsrc, the dog-loving portraitist William Wegman dressed up one of his Weimaraners as Eustace Tilley, our dandyish mascot, originally drawn by Rea Irvin. (The butterfly that canine Eustace studies through his monocle also has a dog’s head.) But no human had broken the barrier until last month, when Cindy Sherman’s image of herself as Eustace covered a special issue on the culture industry. Otherwise, what distinguishes New Yorker covers is the imaginative reach of pen and paintbrush: political metaphors (Lady Liberty walking a tightrope), whimsical New York street scenes, daydreaming cats. Every week comes a work of art.

But what if those images could spring to life, like Pygmalion’s statue? For The New Yorker’s centenary, the magazine asked six photographers to reinterpret covers from our archives as flesh-and-blood portraits, starring familiar faces. The role of Eustace went, this time around, to Spike Lee, who traded in the classic monocle for a movie camera. After all, isn’t Eustace a kind of filmmaker, zooming in for an extreme closeup of the butterfly? The artist Awol Erizku, known for turning Manet and Vermeer paintings into contemporary Black portraiture, posed Lee under a golden basketball net. Rea Irvin, meet the ultimate Knicks fan.

Covers from the Jazz Age hold a glamorous mystique that proved especially enticing. Marilyn Minter adapted Barbara Shermund’s 1925 image of a goddess-like woman in grape-cluster earrings; Minter shot the actor Sadie Sink through glass, creating a dreamy haze. Julian de Miskey’s winking illustration of a soirée of cigarette-smoking swells in top hats and pearls, from 193src—what Great Depression?—was interpreted for a new age of glitter and doom by Alex Prager, featuring the actor and musician Sophie Thatcher and her identical twin, the artist Ellie Thatcher. And Stanley W. Reynolds’s 1926 depiction of a sailor canoodling with his lass struck Collier Schorr as resonant in an era of renewed discrimination against trans service members. In Schorr’s photograph, the duo, played by Julia Garner and Cole Escola, is more ambiguous, more gender-flouting, projecting an air of affectionate defiance. (An extra connection: Garner’s father, the artist Thomas Garner, has illustrated for The New Yorker.)

Jump ahead a few decades. Charles Saxon, a frequent contributor of New Yorker covers from 1959 until the late eighties, tended to draw besuited businessmen, but in 1974, when he was in his fifties, he rendered a gaggle of young bell-bottomed bohemians, perched at the base of a flagpole as if posing for a group photo. (You can almost smell the pot and patchouli oil.) To re-create the image, Ryan McGinley photographed some friends, including the countercultural comedian Julio Torres, at the New York Botanical Garden, in the Bronx, observing them less as curiosities than as peers. And Camila Falquez, whose subjects have included Zendaya and Kamala Harris, shot the Oscar-winning performer Ariana DeBose as the discerning woman with a magnifying glass drawn by Lorenzo Mattotti in 1999. None of these portraits go for detail-for-detail accuracy. Think of them as an elaborate game of dress-up, a century and change in the making.

—Michael Schulman