Beyond the Visual: Describing The New York Times' Most Influential Magazine Covers

Please go to the original New York Times article to view the images discussed in this blog: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/01/t-magazine/magazine-covers-esquire-rolling-stone.html.

At Scribely, we are driven by the foundational belief that all visual content, especially images of significant cultural and historical impact, should be accessible to everyone. When alt text is missing, assistive technology users lack essential visual information, they are cut off from the full emotional and intellectual power of these historical moments. That is why Scribely decided to describe the magazine covers from the New York Times' article "The 25 Most Influential Magazine Covers of All Time", a vital collection of modern visual culture.

To facilitate a complete visual access, we’ve included every cover description along with the most valuable context our writing team extracted from the original New York Times article. We have intentionally removed the visual images from this article, allowing you to focus purely on the words to demonstrate how high quality image description makes visual narrative understandable.

Describing magazine covers requires more than simple identification. The goal is contextual description, creating alt text that meticulously details what is seen and establishes why the image holds significance. This allows every individual to grasp the full meaning of why magazine covers like Muhammad Ali on Esquire or Caitlyn Jenner on Vanity Fair are so influential.

1. Muhammad Ali, Esquire, April 1968

Image Description

Muhammad Ali on the cover of Esquire magazine, April 1968. Wearing a pair of white silk boxers and calf-high white boots, Mohammed Ali stands with his body facing us and hands behind his back. He looks into the distance with his head tipped back and to our left, and his lips are parted. Blood drips from the wooden shafts of five arrows piercing his torso and a sixth in one thigh. Against a white background, gray text in the lower right corner reads “The Passion of Muhammad Ali.”

Context 

“In late 1967, months after Muhammad Ali refused a U.S. Army draft order on religious grounds and found himself excommunicated from boxing for the next three years, he slipped back into a pair of shiny white Everlast shorts. He was on set for Esquire with the photographer Carl Fischer and the art director George Lois — the adman provocateur and freelance art director whose genius for landing a visual punch defined the magazine’s covers in the ’60s. (He memorably put an ironic halo on Joe McCarthy’s lawyer Roy Cohn, among other things.) Here, the goal was to convince the Muslim athlete to assume the role of Saint Sebastian, with Francesco Botticini’s c. 1465 painting of the martyr as a particular reference point. After Ali agreed, they just had to figure out how to realistically stick him with a half-dozen arrows, an effect achieved with a combination of glue and fishing line. Once known for his trash-talking bravado, the boxer had emerged as a celebrity athlete with a cause: ‘I’m taking a stand for what I believe in and being one thousand percent for the freedom of the black people,’ he told the writer Leonard Shecter in the accompanying story. Soon after the issue arrived on newsstands, Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, giving the photograph a prophetic charge. — Laura Regensdorf” (New York Times).

2. “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog,” National Lampoon, January 1973.

Image Description

“If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog,” National Lampoon magazine cover, January 1973. A pale-skinned hand holds up a silver revolver aimed at a black-and-white dog’s head. The person grips the gun tightly with the index finger nearly pulling on the trigger. The dog leans away from the gun, ears flattened and eyes cutting toward the weapon. Against a marine-blue background, the magazine name appears in rounded, pale blue letters above. The headline, in yellow text, is in the lower right corner: “If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.”

Context

“A spinoff from The Harvard Lampoon, the university’s now 150-year-old humor magazine, National Lampoon launched in 1970 and quickly distinguished itself with an ethos that people found either amusing or appalling or both. Its most famous cover, for its ‘Death’ issue in 1973, features an uneasy-looking dog, Mr. Cheeseface, with a gun held to his head and the line ‘If You Don’t Buy This Magazine, We’ll Kill This Dog.’ National Lampoon frequently skewered politicians and celebrities — it ran a fake ad for a Volkswagen that floated like a water beetle, with the copy ‘If Ted Kennedy drove a Volkswagen, he’d be president today’ — but here the staff were making fun of themselves as magazine makers. Covers are, after all, about compelling someone to pick up the issue, and why not satirize that with a desperate joke told at the expense of an adorable pet? Ed Bluestone, a stand-up comic and Lampoon staffer, came up with the idea; the picture was taken by the photographer Ronald G. Harris, who said that because Cheeseface is side-eyeing the revolver rather than staring straight ahead, the joke lands. The cover would inspire future magazines, from Spy to George, to keep testing the limits of satire. — Miguel Morales” (New York Times).

3. “Moment of Joy,” The New Yorker, July 8 & 15, 2013.

Image Description

The New Yorker magazine cover, July 8 & 15, 2013. From slightly behind Sesame Street characters Bert and Ernie, we look at an old-fashioned television screen. Lit only by the tv, which shows the justices of the US Supreme Court formally posing in two rows, Bert wraps one arm around Ernie’s shoulder. Ernie leans against Bert, head resting on Bert’s shoulder. Ernie’s orange and Bert’s yellow heads and their tufts of black hair glow softly in the tv’s light.

Context

“In June 2013, a pair of Supreme Court rulings (in Windsor v. United States and Hollingsworth v. Perry) established states’ rights to protect marriage equality, leading to the federal recognition of same-sex unions two years later. To mark the moment, The New Yorker chose an updated version of a cover illustration that the American artist Jack Hunter had submitted to a Tumblr account run by the magazine’s longtime art editor, Françoise Mouly, and her daughter, Nadja Spiegelman. The final cover showed the beloved odd couple of ‘Sesame Street,’ Bert and Ernie, who’ve shared an apartment since 1969, sitting in a darkened living room, Ernie’s head resting on Bert’s shoulder, their silhouettes illuminated by a televised image of the nine justices in black and white. Rather than being explicitly celebratory, the image was muted and domestic. It winked at long-swirling speculation around the characters’ relationship status (‘Sesame Street’’s production company’s response, from 2011: ‘Even though they are identified as male characters and possess many human traits and characteristics [...] they remain puppets, and do not have a sexual orientation’) while validating the experience of the many queer couples who’d followed the cases with hope and trepidation. The image was not without its detractors, who claimed the magazine had trivialized a long legal struggle. But for many others, Hunter’s sweet and earnest cover expressed the true impact of the court’s decision. — Michael Snyder” (New York Times).

4. Ellen DeGeneres, Time, April 14, 1997.

Image Description

Ellen DeGeneres on the April 14, 1997 TIME magazine cover. Squatting casually with elbows resting on knees, Ellen smiles out from behind the headline in red text, which reads, “Yep, I’m Gay." Bangs and short blond hair frame her face, and she wears a black long-sleeved shirt and pants, white loafer-style shoes, a gold-chain necklace, and two rings. Text below the headline reads, “Exclusive: Ellen DeGeneres explains why she’s coming out” and “The changing nature of sex on TV.”

Context

“The ABC sitcom ‘Ellen’ had wrapped its third season and concern was growing within the network and its parent company, Disney, over a decline in viewership. DeGeneres later recalled Disney chief Michael Eisner proposing a solution: Ellen Morgan, the show’s protagonist, should get a dog. DeGeneres had a better idea, one that would solve the show’s identity problem and her own: She and her on-screen alter-ego would reveal they were gay. Her chosen platform was the cover of Time magazine (which then had a circulation of roughly four million) on which readers saw a beaming DeGeneres and the line ‘Yep, I’m Gay.’ That combination of words — casual, declarative and written in the first person — suggested a future where coming out, even as a TV star, would be much less newsworthy. Unfortunately, the public wasn’t fully there yet, as evidenced by some letters to the editor. ‘Your report was an affront to decency in general and the troubled family unit in particular. … Shame on you, Time!’ read one of them. DeGeneres shared the cover on social media in 2022, on the 25th anniversary of the issue, which by that point was widely understood to have eased the way for others wanting to live more freely. ‘I remember coming out,’ she wrote, before joking, ‘I don’t, however, remember saying ‘Yep.’’ — M.M.” (New York Times).

5. “Oh My God — We Hit a Little Girl,” Esquire, October 1966.

Image Description

“Oh My God — We Hit a Little Girl,” Esquire magazine cover, October 1969. The words appear in three lines of bold white text against a black background. Printed with quotation marks, the serifed, traditional text takes up about a third of the cover. Smaller text in the lower left corner reads, “The true story of M Company. From Fort Dix to Vietnam.”

Context

“In December 1965, nearly a year after the U.S. first deployed combat troops to Vietnam, the reporter John Sack began basic training with the soldiers of M Company in Fort Dix, N.J. He didn’t come back from the experience opposed to the war, but in October 1966, when Esquire published his 33,000-word exposé about his journey with the men through the jungles of Vietnam, the narrative spoke for itself. On M’s first operation, a soldier launched a grenade into a hut and made the company’s first kill. ‘Oh my God — we hit a little girl,’ said one of the men in horror. For the cover, Lois pivoted from his original design and printed that quote in bold white type on a black background. Few magazine covers force the viewer to consider the full weight of words alone. (Time’s text-only cover ‘Is God Dead?’, which had come out only six months earlier, may have inspired Lois). Here both the line and the styling captured the senselessness of the Vietnam War, while the ‘we’ implicated the reader. It was among the first anti-Vietnam War magazine covers, and while you never see the girl herself, of course, you can’t read it without grieving for her. — Jason Chen” (New York Times).

6. “Drama of Life Before Birth,” Life, April 30, 1965.

Image Description

“Drama of Life Before Birth,” LIFE magazine cover, April 30, 1965. Full color photo by Lennart Nilsson of a tiny, pale-skinned human fetus encased in its diaphanous amniotic sac turns its large head to one side and holds both miniscule hands at the throat. The feet are crossed, and the round pate pushes against the top of the sac. The pale, lavender-toned umbilical cord reaches from the placenta, a peach-colored mass about two-thirds the size of the fetus to the right, to the baby’s belly button. White specks glint against a black background. The magazine title appears in bold white text against a red rectangle in the upper left corner. Smaller white text near the lower left corner reads, in all caps, “Drama of Life before Birth.” Text in mixed case above this reads, “Unprecedented photographic feat in color,” and, to the right, “Living 18-week-old fetus shown inside its amniotic sac—placenta is seen at right.”

Context

“In the early 1950s, the Swedish photographer Lennart Nilsson made a remarkable claim to the incredulous editors of Life: He was going to document the stages of human reproduction in full color. It took 12 years of experimenting with wide-angled optics and macro lenses, but he eventually made good on his word. In April 1965, the magazine published his extraordinary cover image of an 18-week-old fetus, luminous in its amniotic sac, seemingly floating through space, along with an extensive photo essay. Nilsson had worked closely with a Stockholm hospital, where he had a makeshift studio set up. He’d get a call when a woman had had a miscarriage or came in for an abortion, which had been legally permissible in Sweden since 1938 if the woman’s life was in danger. The photographer would then rush over with his Hasselblad camera. Only one image in the photo essay was of a live fetus in utero. All the others, including the groundbreaking cover, were of fetuses that had been surgically removed. In the 1980s, after learning that his pictures were being used at anti-abortion demonstrations, Nilsson refused to allow them to be republished. He continued to pioneer scientific photography, though, placing tiny cameras in flowers, tracking a coronary thrombosis and shooting close-ups of the H5N1 virus. When asked directly about his views on the beginning of life, Nilsson, who died in 2017, said, ‘It depends on yourself. I’m just a journalist telling you things. — Liz Brown” (New York Times).

7. “9/11/2001,” The New Yorker, Sept. 24, 2001.

Image Description

“9/11/2001,” The New Yorker magazine cover, September 24, 2001. Two tall, narrow skyscrapers are silhouetted in inky black against a dark, charcoal-gray background. A spire-like antenna reaching up from the Twin Tower on the left overlaps the magazine title above, which is printed in white text.

Context

“On the morning of Sept. 11, 2001, Mouly and her husband, the cartoonist Art Spiegelman, had just left their SoHo apartment when they saw a plane fly into the North Tower of the World Trade Center. Soon after, the couple found themselves trying to distill the violence into a magazine cover. At first, Remnick’s art editor considered the idea of an entirely black cover: ‘What kind of illustration could do justice to the attack?’ But within days the couple had come up with another idea — Spiegelman suggested some kind of black-on-black treatment, and Mouly mocked up a dark silhouette of the towers set against a slightly less varnished black background. Only in certain light would the lost buildings emerge. Mouly later explained that she’s ‘always been captivated by how a simple drawing can cut through the torrent of images that we see every single day.’ Not only did the cover capture the emotional gravity of the event, but it also encapsulated the collective effort required to produce a magazine in difficult conditions: The magazine’s pre-press manager, Greg Captain, drove 15 hours to the Kentucky printing press to ensure the ink densities achieved just the right effect. — James Draney” (New York Times).

8. Eliot Spitzer, New York, March 24, 2008.

Image Description

Eliot Spitzer on the New York magazine cover, March 24, 2008. Wearing a navy-blue suit, white shirt, red tie, and American flag pin, Eliot Spitzer stands with hands clasped down in front of him, smiling comfortably out at us against a white background. White text in a vivid red rectangle next to his knees reads “BRAIN,” and a red arrow points to Spitzer’s crotch. Smaller red text near the top left corner reads, “The Governor’s Fall.”

Context

“When, in March 2008, New York governor Eliot Spitzer was unmasked as ‘Client 9’ in a prostitution scandal, Moss, then New York magazine’s editor in chief, scrapped the cover planned for the next issue. Jody Quon, who’s now the creative director of the magazine, reached out to a handful of artists and illustrators, soliciting concepts for a replacement. The winner was Barbara Kruger, whose early start in magazines — she was Mademoiselle’s head designer at 22 — informed her style as an artist: images overlaid with text, typically in red-and-white Futura Bold Italic, which probe truisms of power and gender. Kruger replied to Quon an hour later, amending a portrait of Spitzer (photographed by Henry Leutwyler) with two simple interventions: the word ‘BRAIN’ and an arrow pointing at his crotch. As a Spitzer appointee said of the governor’s undoing in the accompanying story, ‘I don’t know that we need to overanalyze it. At its base it’s an old story.’ — L.R.” (New York Times).

9. Caitlyn Jenner, Vanity Fair, July 2015.

Image Description

Caitlyn Jenner on the Vanity Fair magazine cover, June 2015. Wearing an ivory-white corset and panties, Caitlyn Jenner leans with arms behind her back into a soft-toned gold-colored corner in this photograph taken by Annie Leibowitz. Caitlyn's face is angled slightly to our right as she cuts her brown eyes back at us. She smiles slightly, and her long, chestnut-brown hair falls in waves. Her shoulders are squared to us, and breasts swell above the corset. Her smooth legs are tightly crossed, and the top of the wooden stool on which she perches is just visible. The headline appears in black text about a third of the way up from the bottom: “Call me Caitlyn.” The magazine title stretches in tall, capital letters across the top of the cover, behind Jenner’s head.

Context

“Tabloids speculated endlessly over the changing appearance of Olympian turned reality dad Bruce Jenner in 2014. Tasteless as the coverage of Jenner’s lengthening hair, painted fingernails and shrinking Adam’s apple was, the physical transformation was undeniable, and yet the patriarch of the Kardashian-Jenners wouldn’t confirm anything publicly. By early 2015, there were rumblings of an imminent announcement: A docuseries was in the works, a Diane Sawyer sit-down arranged. But it turned out Jenner had also been secretly meeting with the Vanity Fair writer Buzz Bissinger for a profile. To prevent leaks, the magazine employed intense confidentiality measures, limiting knowledge of the project to eight staffers, isolating work on the story to one offline computer and hiring a security firm to guard Jenner’s Malibu home. The July cover — an Annie Leibovitz photograph of Jenner posed like a classic Hollywood pinup in a white satin corset, for which Lauren Bacall had served as a reference — had the simple headline ‘Call Me Caitlyn,’ written by Vanity Fair’s editor in chief, Graydon Carter. With those three words, Jenner wrested back her narrative, became the face of a movement and ignited a groundbreaking discussion around gender identity. For many, Caitlyn was the first trans person they’d gotten to know. And Vanity Fair proved that not only could a century-old publication still deliver a scoop, it could also lead one of the biggest conversations of the era. — J.C.” (New York Times).

10. Demi Moore, Vanity Fair, August 1991.

Image Description

Demi Moore on the Vanity Fair magazine cover, August 1991. Shown nude and standing facing our left in profile, Demi Moore’s skin glows in soft light against a smoky gray background in this photograph taken by Annie Leibowitz. She holds her right arm across her breasts, and she wears a thumb-nail-sized diamond on that middle finger. Her other hand wraps under her pregnant belly. Moore’s face turns toward us to look up and off into the distance. A teardrop-shaped diamond earring hangs from the ear we see, and her dark hair is cut short. White text with words stacked in a column to the left reads, “More Demi Moore by Nancy Collins.”

Context

“Demi Moore was pregnant with her second child when she and Leibovitz, at the end of a long portrait session in 1991, decided to try a few shots in the nude. Tina Brown, Vanity Fair’s editor in chief (who’d just had her second child) selected one of them for the magazine’s August cover, and Moore was thrilled. Fresh off the success of ‘Ghost’ (1990), she didn’t anticipate the backlash. Several supermarket chains refused to stock the magazine, citing concerns over exposing ‘very young children’ to the image of Moore, hands placed over her left breast and under her belly. The actress would soon be hit with criticism after criticism: for demanding a fair wage on her 1996 film ‘Striptease’ (industry leaders dubbed her ‘Gimme Moore’); for her shaved head in ‘G.I. Jane’ (1997); for her marriage to a younger man, the actor Ashton Kutcher, which prompted tabloids to scrutinize every inch of her for signs of cosmetic surgery. After many years of this, Moore’s Oscar nomination for the 2024 body-horror film ‘The Substance’ felt like something of a vindication. As does the fact that, in the decades since this cover appeared, countless women, famous and not, have paid homage to Leibovitz’s image, whether in magazines or on social media. There’s no longer any question of whether a pregnant body can be seen as sexy — or seen at all. — M.S.” (New York Times).

12. Yoko Ono and John Lennon, Rolling Stone, Jan. 22, 1981.

Image Description

Yoko Ono and John Lennon on the Rolling Stone magazine cover, January 22, 1981. A nude John Lennon curls his entire body up along a fully dressed Yoko Ono in this photograph taken by Annie Leibowitz. Ono’s long black hair flares up and around her, suggesting they lie on a bed or floor that makes up the off-white background. Her hands are raised overhead, and she looks down and off to our right, past Lennon. His bent knee nearly reaches his armpit where he has pulled it up and over Ono’s torso. He wraps one arm around her head and kisses her cheek. His eyes are closed and his brown hair slightly tousled. The magazine title appears in maroon-red letters with a striped drop shadow.

Context

“In the early afternoon of Dec. 8, 1980, Leibovitz, on assignment for Rolling Stone, visited John Lennon and Yoko Ono in their Upper West Side apartment’s sunny morning room. The ensuing photo shoot, as Lennon told Leibovitz after seeing some test Polaroids, ‘captured our relationship exactly.’ Just hours later, Lennon would be killed by Mark David Chapman outside the couple’s building. So, when the Jan. 22, 1981 issue of the magazine was published, its cover portrait instantly became an elegy for the star — and the countercultural era he and the Beatles represented. It depicts Ono, fully clothed, lying on a white carpet with her nude husband curled up around her. Leibovitz intended the picture as a visual echo of the image of the couple kissing that had been used for the cover of Lennon and Ono’s album ‘Double Fantasy’ (1980). And though Rolling Stone’s editor in chief, Jann Wenner, had originally wanted to feature Lennon alone, the musician had insisted on being photographed with his wife. Today, Leibovitz’s portrait endures as a testament to the musician’s singular devotion to Ono and a monument to the vulnerability inherent in any creative partnership. — J.D.” (New York Times).

12. Madonna, Interview, June 1990.

Image Description

Madonna on the Interview magazine cover, June 1990. Photographed in black and white, Madonna stands and thrusts her hips forward. She leans back with one hand on her chest and the other grabbing her crotch. Her eyes are closed, and her mouth is open wide. Spiky black bangs line her forehead, and long lashes brush her smooth cheeks. She wears a narrow-brimmed hat angled back on her head. Her long-sleeved shirt is patterned with white polka dots against black and has a wide collar and exaggeratedly long and flaring cuffs. She wears boy short-style pants over fishnet stockings. The magazine title is written in slashing red letters above, and smaller text near her hips reads “Madonna” in black followed by a red exclamation point.

Context

“The June 1990 cover of Interview landed in the middle of Madonna’s controversial Blond Ambition tour, capturing what was fast becoming her signature onstage move. The previous month, in Toronto, the pop artist had gotten a warning from local police: ‘If I touch my crotch during the show, I’m going to be arrested,’ she was filmed telling her dancers backstage in her 1991 documentary, ‘Madonna: Truth or Dare,’ defiant in her platinum ponytail and pointy Jean Paul Gaultier corset. (She went for it anyway, without consequence.) On the newsstands, that stereotypically macho gesture felt less transgressive, with Madonna, shot by Herb Ritts, playing a vintage cabaret performer in beaded false lashes and a clownish polka-dot bolero. The magazine added a slim red exclamation point after the singer’s name — emphasizing her shock value — and in the accompanying interview the star told the writer Glenn O’Brien, ‘I do think someone is protecting me. I don’t know if it’s an angel. It could be the Devil.’ During another performance around that time, she told the crowd, ‘What’s the big deal? You can get upset when I try to grab your crotch. When I grab my crotch, it just means: ‘This is my space.’ — L.R.” (New York Times).

13. “Cosby: The Women; An Unwelcome Sisterhood,” New York, July 27-Aug. 9, 2015.

Image Description

“Cosby: The Women; An Unwelcome Sisterhood,” New York magazine cover, July 27 to August 9, 2015. Photographed in black and white, 35 women sit in four rows on narrow-backed chairs. Each woman sits with both feet on the floor and hands resting on her knees or upper thighs. The top three rows each have ten women in them. The bottom row has five and ends with a sixth spot, empty chair. Text below each women specifies a date, either a year, like 1971, or span of time, “Ca. late 1980s.” Text next to the empty chair reads, “Cosby” in thin, spidery text above “The Women” in bold typeface. Smaller text continues, “An Unwelcome Sisterhood by Noreen Malone, A Portfolio by Amanda Demme.” The magazine title is in red letters above.

Context

“One after another, each woman, dressed in black, took a seat, placed her hands in her lap, and looked into the camera. It was the spring of 2015, two years before ‘#MeToo’ took over Twitter, and Quon had hired Amanda Demme to shoot an extraordinary series of portraits. For decades, stories about Cosby drugging and assaulting women had circulated in the entertainment world, but the TV star, comedian and Jell-O spokesman’s power was so absolute that it was hard to envision they’d ever break through to the public. And yet after a short riff by the comic Hannibal Buress about Cosby’s history made the rounds on the internet, something shifted: Women were coming forward with harrowing accounts, and instead of other people ignoring or dismissing them, they were actually listening. Quon wanted a cover story that focused not on the famous assailant but on these women. It was an immense undertaking in terms of managing logistics and building trust, but 35 out of the 46 who’d spoken publicly agreed to participate, and the magazine soon scheduled shoots in Los Angeles, Las Vegas and New York. Demme had the idea of showing the subjects against a stark background, though it wasn’t until she, and later the art department, saw the portraits en masse that the final image came into being: a tableau of four rows with an empty chair at the very end — both a symbol of those not pictured and an acknowledgment that the reckoning had barely begun. — L.B.” (New York Times).

14. “View of the World From 9th Avenue,” The New Yorker, March 29, 1976.

Image Description

“View of the World From 9th Avenue,” New Yorker magazine cover, March 29, 1976. We look slightly down onto and across four city blocks in a hand-drawn, perspective view. Ninth Avenue runs parallel to the bottom edge of the cover. A street runs vertically past 10th Avenue and to the Hudson River, which stretches across the cover about two-thirds of the way up the illustration. Cars, trucks, buses, and people bustle in the city streets, but color leeches out the cityscape as it moves back in space. Beyond the river, a rectangular, straw-yellow block has a thin darker brown line labeled “Jersey.” Beyond are labels reading Washington, D.C., Kansas City, Nebraska, Las Vegas, Utah, Texas, and Chicago interspersed sparsely among a few rocky outcroppings. Separated from this block with dotted lines, Mexico and Canada are labeled in white to either side. A white band labeled the Pacific Ocean is beyond, and long strips of white land representing China, Japan, and Russia line the horizon.

Context

“The 1970s were a good decade for New York City maps. In 1972, the Italian designer Massimo Vignelli and his associates distilled the jumble of subway routes into tidy colorful lines — an ordered landscape that didn’t always correspond to the reality above ground. Four years later, the Romanian-born American artist Saul Steinberg brought his imagined slice of Manhattan to the cover of The New Yorker. Like the Vignelli map, ‘View of the World From 9th Avenue’ was all the more legible and beloved for its geographic inaccuracies. The hand-drawn scene looks west over a few fastidiously detailed city blocks. But after the Hudson River comes a nearly featureless expanse, save for a smattering of names (of airport hubs, cowboy states), a narrow strip of Pacific Ocean and distant doughy lumps (China, Japan, Russia). Here was Steinberg’s genius at work, zeroing in on a familiar phenomenon — in this case, New York’s collective myopia. ‘That was his goal,’ said Mouly of Steinberg’s commissions for The New Yorker, which published its first drawing of his in 1941: ‘To make images so iconic that they live on in our brains as units of thoughts.’ A contributor to the magazine for nearly six decades and a lodestar among subsequent generations of artists (the cartoonist and illustrator Liana Finck dubbed him ‘the winking philosopher’), Steinberg remains best known for his gently skewering ‘View,’ reproductions of which have been hung on countless Manhattan walls — and lots of other places, too. — L.R.” (New York Times).

15. “Aviation as Seen by Monkeys,” Fortune, January 1931.

Image Description

“Aviation as Seen by Monkeys," Fortune magazine cover, January 1931. In an illustration style made up of areas of flat color, 14 white monkeys gather on a gray branch that cuts through dark green leaves of a dense canopy. Through a gap in the leaves, the animals all peer out at a brick-red and white monoplane cutting across a cream-white sky. The scene is enclosed by a tan-colored frame.

Context

“In 1930, several months after the stock market crashed, Henry Luce launched Fortune. It was hardly an auspicious moment for a lush new magazine devoted to the machinations of American corporations, but the media magnate insisted there was a ready audience. Until then, business publications had been trade journals filled with dry statistics. Luce, who’d co-founded Time seven years earlier, understood that the movement of capital was of great interest to those moving it — and that a magazine itself could be a status object. Some 30,000 people subscribed to the inaugural 184-page issue, all willing to pay a dollar (nearly $20 today) per issue. Here was a publication about money that itself felt like money, with its thick paper stock, grand proportions (11 by 14 inches) and vibrant illustrated covers commissioned from artists (Antonio Petruccelli, Ervine Metzl) and displaying railroads, smokestacks, steamships and other emblems of enterprise with glorious creativity. In Neal Bose’s January 1931 cover, a classic example of the magazine’s sensibility, a troupe of monkeys scramble to catch a glimpse of a then-novel phenomenon: an airplane soaring overhead. As the years passed, styles changed, but Fortune held onto its aesthetic mission: In July 1965, Walter Allner, the publication’s Bauhaus-trained art director, designed the first magazine cover using computer graphics. Its depiction of ascending arrows was less whimsical than the monkeys, but the image nonetheless conveyed energy and delight — a far cry from the cold graphics and interchangeable portraits of CEOs and other power players that peer out from most business publications today. — L.B.” (New York Times).

16. Marilyn Monroe, Avant Garde, March 1968.

Image Description

Marilyn Monroe on the Avant Garde magazine cover, March 1968. Details of Monroe’s face are washed out in a haze of white. With her face nearly filling the cover, her head tips to our right as she looks at us with hooded eyes. She bites down on a chain, perhaps jeweled, so it trails from one corner of her mouth. Only her dark brows, nostrils, and the dark space under her parted, upper lip stand out against her otherwise white face. Her wavy hair blends into the background, and a round form in the lower left corner of the cover may be her shoulder. A square of blue text in the lower right corner, “The Marilyn Monroe Trip: A Portfolio of Serigraphic Prints by Bert Stern, Avant Garde 2.”

Context

“When the American photographer Bert Stern and Marilyn Monroe met in the summer of 1962 for a Vogue feature, he was more interested in the woman than in the clothes. A suite at Hollywood’s Hotel Bel-Air served as the set, and he brought along a suitcase full of necklaces and scarves — accessories that suggested easygoing spontaneity when compared to the magazine’s chosen dresses and furs. (A second day of shooting with some of those items followed.) The resulting portraits were luminous and unguarded, rare qualities (back then and especially now) when it came to celebrity subjects. Monroe reviewed a number of the contact sheets, striking out frames with an orange X, though she died by overdose before the issue was published. The roughly 2,500 photos from ‘The Last Sitting’ defined Stern’s career but left him unsatisfied: ‘They never quite communicated the dazzling image of Marilyn that existed in my mind’s eye,’ he explained in a 1968 issue of Avant Garde, a short-lived magazine edited and published by Ralph Ginzburg in collaboration with the designer Herb Lubalin. (The latter’s slanted logo gave rise to a typeface of the same name.) A forerunner to zine culture and art-book publishing, Avant Garde offered Stern another chance to get it right by running ‘The Marilyn Monroe Trip,’ a collection of experimental, acid-colored serigraphs, based on his original images, that brought the screen star into the pop-psychedelic era. By contrast, the cover struck an unassuming note, with kraft-style paper in lieu of the usual glossy stock and a palette of umber tones informed by the Southern California landscape: Marilyn Monroe, a natural beauty at last finding her light. — L.R.” (New York Times).

17. Produce, Gourmet, May 1969.

Image Description

Produce on the Gourmet magazine cover, May 1969. Bright sunlight glints off ripe tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, green beans, leafy greens, and other vegetables laid out along a stone ledge. Two columns on the far side of the ledge are fractured, and a partially ruined statue of a person wearing a toga is near the more distant column, to our left. The ledge gives way to placid water, which stretches to a far bank where four more marble sculptures of people stand.

Context

“Gourmet, the self-described magazine of ‘good living,’ was established in 1941, a time when Americans would soon be forced to ration staples like sugar and coffee, and few were fussing over haute cuisine. That didn’t stop the founder and publishing veteran Earle MacAusland from selling his vision of food as fantasy, which, in the midst of wartime deprivation, clearly appealed to readers. By the early ’60s, the magazine, under the eye of its executive editor Jane Montant, had distinguished itself with its rich photography and focus on travel, both of which come to life on the magazine’s May 1969 cover. Shot by the British photographer Ronny Jaques, it shows a stone ledge running along a sky-scrimmed reflecting pool — part of the 1,900-year-old remains of the Roman emperor Hadrian’s villa complex near Tivoli — lain with immaculate produce, from crisp green beans to bright red tomatoes to Rosa Bianca eggplants, all of which gleam like mythological spoils. The setting was Italy, but the style recalled that of the Dutch masters. Along with the rest of the issue, which included writing by the chef and author James Beard, the cover helped create an era — one we’re still in, as a quick scroll will attest — where food was serious, seductive and a marker of status. — M.M.” (New York Times).

18. “Planet or Plastic?,” National Geographic, June 2018.

Image Description

“Planet or Plastic," National Geographic magazine cover, June 2018. The top third of the cover shows the pointed tip of an iceberg reaching out of a body of gently rippling water. Below the water line, we see that what appeared to be glacial ice is actually the upended, bottom corner of a plastic shopping bag. The handles reach down as light filters through the pristine water. White text reads, “Planet or Plastic?” Smaller text below reads, “18 billion pounds of plastic ends up in the ocean each year. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.” Even smaller, italicized and quoted text to the left reads, “‘Plastics aren’t inherently bad. It’s what we do, or don’t do, with them that counts.’ Sylvia Earle, National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence.” The entire cover is surrounded with a bright yellow border. A red arrowhead to the right points to the headline.

Context

“The image inside the iconic yellow frame is simple and familiar — an iceberg rising out of the ocean — but then comes the chilling double take: This is actually a gargantuan plastic bag. The Mexican artist Jorge Gamboa first created the photo illustration in 2017 for a group show at a Mexican college; later that year, it won a prize at a Bolivian design biennial. Afterward, National Geographic published it on its cover to mark the launch of its #PlanetOrPlastic campaign to reduce single-use plastic. Within a day of Vaughn Wallace, the magazine’s photo editor, sharing the cover on Twitter, it had gone viral. The clever optical illusion also delivers a primal shock: This could be a still from a horror movie, one in which an ordinary plastic bag has taken on monstrous force — a mutant of our own making. In 2018, when Gamboa’s ‘Iceberg Plástico’ was published, the magazine reported that 18 billion pounds of plastic were entering the world’s oceans per year. Today, the global conservancy group Oceana estimates that figure to be 33 billion. — L.B.” (New York Times).

19. Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle and Peggy Lipton, TV Guide, Sept. 8-14, 1990.

Image Description

Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Peggy Lipton on the TV Guide magazine cover, September 8 to 14, 1990. Layered one over the other, three women look out at us and filling the cover. The uppermost, Sheryl Lee, has a cloud of dark hair and bangs, and she smiles slightly as she leans from our right to our left. The next woman down, Lara Flynn Boyle, leans in the opposite direction and looks out with the merest hint of a smile. Her brown hair appears blown back from her forehead. The third, Peggy Lipton at the bottom, is positioned similarly to Lee. Lipton smiles broadly as her wavy blond hair falls over her shoulders. Black text in a yellow box near the top right corner reads, “Best-selling authors tell: How we’d resolve the Twin Peaks mystery.” Text in the lower left corner of the cover reads, “Woman of ABC’s Twin Peaks (clockwise from top): Sheryl Lee, Lara Flynn Boyle, and Peggy Lipton.”

Context

“In 1990, the most-watched shows on television were ‘Roseanne,’ ‘The Cosby Show’ and ‘Cheers.’ With the surreal, operatic ‘Twin Peaks,’ which premiered that April and combined neo-noir and psychological horror, the director David Lynch, along with co-creator Mark Frost, forever transformed a TV landscape awash in sentiment and moralizing. And while the show never quite achieved mass popularity (after 36 million people watched the two-hour premiere, its ratings faltered), it had its claim on the culture. When three of the show’s female stars appeared on the digest-size cover of TV Guide on the eve of its second season in September 1990 — in a stacked, slightly gauzy composition photographed by Mario Casilli that nodded to the homecoming queen portrait of Laura Palmer that appears in the show — it was the ultimate expression of the experimental crossing over into the mainstream. At the time, TV Guide had the third-largest circulation of any publication in the country (with 15.8 million readers in the first half of that year), and this magazine of channel listings had created something beautiful, poignant and weird: Lynchian, in other words. Now, the cover also harks back to a time when watching just about anything was a more collective experience, and one very much buoyed by print, whether TV Guide or its glossier counterparts. The next month, the women of ‘Twin Peaks’ made the cover of Rolling Stone. — J.C.” (New York Times).

 20. Michaela Bercu, Vogue, November 1988.

Image Description

Michaela Bercu on the Vogue magazine cover, November 1988. Shown from the hips up, a young woman stands smiling broadly in the sun. A breeze lifts her long blond, wavy hair. Her eyes are narrowed so it is impossible to tell if she looks at us or off into the distance. The puffed, long sleeves of her dark shirt are pushed up on her forearms. A gold and jeweled cross takes up most of the chest on the shirt, and a strip of bare skin separates the top from the waistband of stonewashed jeans. The pale background is blurry in the distance. All lower-case hot pink text down each side of the cover reads, “the real cost of looking good,” “paris couture, haute but not haughty,” “men, the new bimbos?,” and “fashion, color catches on.”

Context

“For 17 years, Grace Mirabella ruled Vogue as editor in chief, and her covers dependably featured a big-haired, big-eyed model with a Mona Lisa expression and cheeks only slightly less painted than her lips, carefully framed on a white studio background and often shot by Richard Avedon. When Anna Wintour, who replaced Mirabella in the summer of 1988, debuted her first issue in November, she obliterated her predecessor’s visual legacy with a single image. Gone were the famous heroines (Isabella Rossellini, Paulina Porizkova), and in their place was the 18-year-old Israeli model Michaela Bercu, her spontaneous smile so wide she looked like she was squinting, her wavy blond hair swept across her neck, because the Peter Lindbergh photo had been taken outside. The details have become fashion lore — that Bercu, as styled by Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, wore stonewashed $50 Guess jeans with a $10,000 haute couture bejeweled Christian Lacroix jacket because the piece’s matching skirt didn’t fit; that Wintour’s cover presaged ‘high-low’ long before Karl Lagerfeld for H&M; that the magazine’s printers called Vogue to ensure the cover wasn’t a mistake. It wasn’t. And the breezy, relatable image, which so firmly set the standard it now appears unremarkable, sent a clear message that a new reign had begun. — J.C.” (New York Times).

21. “Boy With Baby Carriage,” The Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1916.

Image Description

“Boy With Baby Carriage," Saturday Evening Post magazine cover, May 20, 1916. Rendered in muted gray, smoky black, white, and hits of tangerine orange, one boy pushes a wicker baby carriage as two more scoff in this Norman Rockwell oil painting. All three have pale-toned skin, short hair, and flushed cheeks. To our right, the boy with the carriage wears a pinstriped, charcoal-gray suit jacket, a high-collared white shirt, brick-red tie, a red carnation boutonniere, dark brown gloves, and a black bowler hat. A baby bottle half-filled with milk is tucked into his jacket’s chest pocket. He glowers with brows deeply furrowed and lower lip stuck out over his dimpled chin. He looks intently down at the gray carriage, where one tiny orange shoe kicks out. Two boys heading in the opposite direction, to our left, wear baseball uniforms and gray and orange caps. One smirks as he doffs his cap at the first boy, and the third boy holds a baseball glove in one hand and rests his other index finger on his chin.

Context

“Norman Rockwell’s first cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, ‘Boy With Baby Carriage,’ depicts a stern boy dressed up in dapper attire pushing a pram past two other boys in baseball uniforms. One of the players tips his hat, flaunting his leisure, while the other looks on, gaptoothed and amused. Previous Post covers often featured idealized portraits of women at leisure in sterile poses easily mistaken for advertisements. This one showed the dynamic friction of urban life in the United States, injecting an element of narrative realism into the magazine’s style. Rockwell biographer Deborah Solomon ranked it among the artist’s most ‘psychologically intense’ works. Look again at the faces: The boy pushing the carriage is weighed down by his responsibilities; the jeering kids, meanwhile, aren’t necessarily bullies. The illustrator, who was 22 when he sold the image to the Post, went on to produce hundreds of their covers, which all told a story while straddling the line between everyday life and nostalgia. (Think of the bare-bottomed young patient inspecting his local doctor’s framed credentials in 1958’s ‘Before the Shot’). But ‘Boy With Baby Carriage’ set the Rockwellian tone, evolving the look of magazines and, arguably, America’s imagination of itself. — J.D.” (New York Times).

22. Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Ebony, May 1968.

Image Description

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on the Ebony magazine cover, May 1968. Dr. King Jr.’s head and shoulders nearly fill the cover. Dr. King holds his hand to his chin so that forefinger lies along his cheek. He looks off to our left under a slightly furrowed brow, and his black hair and trim mustache are cut short. He wears a wedding ring, a gold watch, a black suit and tie, and a white collared shirt. More people are blurry in the background behind him. The magazine name appears in bold white letters in a black rectangle at the top left. White text in the bottom right corner reads, in quotes, “‘I’ve Been To The Mountaintop,’ Martin Luther King Jr., 1929-1968.”

Context

“Founded by the businessman John H. Johnson in 1945, Ebony would become one of the most popular magazines among Black Americans, long ignored or maligned by other national publications. Given this, the magazine’s initial aim of showing ‘the positive everyday achievements from Harlem to Hollywood’ was political in its own way, but beginning with the Civil Rights Movement, it increasingly covered history and politics head-on. After the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated on April 4, 1968, Time didn’t put him on its cover. Life did, but only afforded him seven of its 100-plus pages. And The Atlantic, a magazine founded by abolitionists, hardly mentioned his passing. Ebony, by contrast, chose a spare photo of King, his hand under his chin, for its May 1968 cover. The picture had been taken by Moneta Sleet Jr., a longtime staff photographer whom Coretta Scott King reportedly requested document her husband’s funeral. (Sleet’s picture of the widow holding her daughter during the service won him a Pulitzer Prize.) Inside the issue, the magazine ran two features on King and included the conclusion to the prescient ‘I’ve Been to the Mountaintop’ speech he’d delivered the night before his death — ‘I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the Promised Land!’ — turning Ebony’s pages into an instrument of mourning, a memento that kept his image and final words alive. — M.M.” (New York Times).

23. Brandi Chastain, Sports Illustrated, July 19, 1999.

Image Description

Brandi Chastain on the Sports Illustrated magazine cover, July 19, 1999. Soccer player Brandi Chastain raises both fists high as she kneels on a grassy soccer pitch on this Sports Illustrated magazine cover. She wears a forest-green sports bra and white shorts. Her long, dark blond hair is tied back but bangs blow in the wind. An earring glints in one ear as she opens her mouth wide, eyes squinted shut. She holds her white soccer jersey in one fist, and the tips of her shoes are visible to either side of her knees. Clear text outlined in white and black reading “Yes!” stretches across and off both sides of the cover across her hips. Smaller white text below reads, “Why Brandi Chastain and the U.S. Women’s Soccer Team Were Unbeatable.”

Context

“When the U.S. faced China in a packed Rose Bowl stadium for the final match of the 1999 Women’s World Cup, mainstream media was starting to grasp that there was a growing and enthusiastic audience for women’s sports. An estimated 40 million people were watching the television broadcast, and the photographer Robert Beck was in the stadium to take pictures for Sports Illustrated of the crowd, which included President Bill Clinton in a V.I.P. box. After the goalless game went into overtime and then a penalty shootout, Beck, despite not having credentials to be on the field, slipped through the stands to get a closer vantage point just as the shooters were lining up. It was a 4-4 tie when Brandi Chastain’s shot sailed past the goalkeeper Gao Hong and into the net. The crowd exploded and an ecstatic Chastain ripped off her shirt, displayed her sports bra and dropped to her knees. That’s when Beck took his shot. Certainly, in the era of lad mags, readers were used to looking at barely clothed women. This, though, was a complete departure from the usual commodified female form: Chastain had taken her shirt off to celebrate. Plenty of soccer players had done the same before her, except they weren’t women. So not only did Beck’s photo capture an astonishing moment in women’s sports — it offered a generation of young girls seeing Sports Illustrated a new vision of themselves. — L.B.” (New York Times).

24. “Women in Revolt,” Newsweek, March 23, 1970.

Image Description

“Women in Revolt", Newsweek magazine cover, March 23, 1970. Shown from the hips up in a psychedelic style, a nude woman shaded in scarlet red, amethyst purple, and snow white tips her head back and raises one fist. Her torso breaks through a Venus symbol shown in cobalt blue, of a circle atop a smaller cross, which traditionally represented female. The magazine title above is in the same color blue, and in bold black, all capital letters just below the title, the headline reads “Women in Revolt.”

Context

“Newsweek harnessed the force of the women’s lib movement with this March 1970 cover, featuring a photo-illustration of a woman tinged in revolution-red, her raised fist busting through the ring of the female gender symbol, an ancient astrological symbol for Venus popularized by the Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus in the 18th century to help him differentiate between male and female plants. Above it was the line ‘Women in Revolt,’ a characterization that, as it turned out, also applied to the Newsweek staff. On the day the issue was released, 46 female employees, having held covert meetings in the office bathroom and at a nearby restaurant called the Women’s Exchange before seeking the help of the lawyer Eleanor Holmes Norton, announced that they were filing a lawsuit against the magazine for gender discrimination. In those days, women at the magazine were secretaries, fact-checkers or mail girls (Nora Ephron had been one for the editor in chief Osborn Elliott in 1962) while men were writers and editors. In an exception that proved the rule, the ‘Women in Revolt’ cover story had been written by a woman, Helen Dudar, though she wasn’t a staffer but a freelancer — and the wife of a Newsweek editor. The cover, then, was immediately linked to an instance of feminism in action. And in addition to changing things at Newsweek — Lynn Povich, who went on to write a book, ‘The Good Girls Revolt’ (2013), about the case, was named its first female senior editor in 1975 — the suit precipitated similar ones against Time Inc., Reader’s Digest, The New York Times and other press outlets. — J.C.” (New York Times).

25. “The Doe Eye,” Vogue, January 1950.

Image Description

"The Doe Eye," Vogue magazine cover, January 1950. A heavily eyeshadowed eye, a pair of cherry-red lips, and a black mole appear on a background of solid white in this illustration by René Gruau. The iris and eye shadow are emerald green, and black lashes follow the eye’s gaze down and to our right. A thin eyebrow curves over the eye. The mole rests just off the corner of the mouth, which is near the lower left corner of the cover. The magazine title appears in black text above, and smaller text below that reads, “1950, Mid-Century Fashions, Faces, Ideas” in all caps.

Context

“In the 1930s, Vogue moved away from illustrated covers, eventually adopting its now-familiar formula: a photograph of a model or celebrity (or several) layered over or under the slender serifs of the publication’s nameplate. But for its January 1950 issue, Alexander Liberman, Vogue’s art director and an accomplished multidisciplinary artist in his own right — he loved Modernism — oversaw an image by Erwin Blumenfeld that reduced the face of the supermodel Jean Patchett to its most minimal. A shadowed green eye, an arched eyebrow, cherry-red lips and a birthmark were made to float over a white void in an abstraction of the so-called ‘doe-eyed look.’ Before emigrating to New York to escape World War II, the German-born Blumenfeld had spent his formative years in Amsterdam, where he threw himself into the Dada movement, making drawings, photographs and collages that combined political commentary with a humorous approach to the human form. In one 1932 work, he cut the eyes, mouth and nose from a black-and-white photo of a woman and shifted them around the frame. With his Vogue cover, produced almost two decades later, he took that idea (moving Patchett’s birthmark from the upper right to the lower left side of her face) and made it feel fresh, opening new possibilities for fashion photography experimentation. — M.S.” (New York Times).