"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 2000, 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."
"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 New Yorker historically favored illustrated covers, with photography appearing only twice in its first hundred years. For the centenary, six photographers reimagined archival covers as live portraits, casting familiar faces in iconic roles. Spike Lee portrayed Eustace Tilley, exchanging the monocle for a movie camera in Awol Erizku's image beneath a golden basketball net. Marilyn Minter channeled a 1925 goddess figure by photographing Sadie Sink through glass; Alex Prager reinterpreted a 1930 winking soirée illustration with Sophie Thatcher and her twin Ellie. The project juxtaposed the magazine's painted visual tradition with contemporary photographic portraiture and cultural references.
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