A picture says a thousand words, or so the saying goes. It's a special feat when said picture is supposed to accentuate an actual thousand words, as is the case in magazine publishing. Here are some of the most memorable magazine covers in history, whose imagery has far surpassed the stories inside.
Above, the 1980 Rolling Stone cover, featuring John Lennon and Yoko Ono, photographed by Annie Leibovitz hours before Lennon was shot and killed in New York City. It's a striking image, but knowing the awful times that lay just beyond the camera's click makes it most memorable and poignant.
Less tragic is the 1997 Time cover where Ellen DeGenerses comes out of the closet, though there was an immediate backlash. She lost her top-rated sitcom around a year later. I so clearly remember seeing this issue at the grocery store and kind of being bewildered--both about the hooplah surrounding someone's personal life and at the negative reactions surrounding the announcement. There's still a long way to go in terms of acceptance for all people, but looking at this cover, it's easy to measure the growth in tolerance over the last fifteen years.
I wasn't alive in the proverbial summer of '69 so I don't actually remember this cover. However, I'm both a photography and travel nut, so to think about Neil Armstrong carrying a camera to the moon to shoot this picture of his partner Buzz Aldrin absolutely stuns me. Technology at its very best.
Here's another one I clearly remember. Cindy Crawford posing as George Washington on the inaugural issue of George magazine, the brainchild of John F. Kennedy, Jr. In a pre-blog world, the concept of morphing politics and pop culture was revitalizing, especially to those of us far removed from urban epicenters. And Cindy Crawford--you couldn't ask for a more precise representation of "cover model" in the 1990s. I wonder what amazing things this publication would have done (and evolved into) had JFK Jr. lived.
I just found this image today. It's by Roy Lichtenstein and was done in 1968 shortly after the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy. Merging pop art and in-your-face opinion, it's hard for me to understand how over 40 years later I still wake up to multiple stories of gun violence every single day.
I also remember a big brouhaha over this 1991 Vanity Fair cover. People were up in arms at the audacity a pregnant woman would have in exposing her body while in such an "unsexy" shape. Kudos to both Moore and Vanity Fair for having the foresight to recognize the beauty and balls behind this image.
I don't necessarily remember when this issue of National Geographic came out. I just don't remember a time where I wasn't familiar with it. This Afghan girls' striking eyes on an otherwise calm face gave more humanity to "the other" than more commonly used pictures of carnage and landscape. This was taken 26 years ago and we're still watching Afghan's young and old suffer so much brutality.
