Illustration is a funny thing. It surrounds us. Books, magazines, advertisements, movie posters, CD covers-- all contain thoughtfully executed, intelligent images that can compress all of the pathos or humor or beauty in a story or an event into one memory that we carry with us. That is, if we remember to stop and really look at them.
They say that in children's books, children read the pictures while their parents read the words. Istvan Banyai's New Yorker cover dated September 13, 2004 is a picture for adults to read. I saw it the week it came out and looked at it once, looked again more closely, and as realization dawned I was almost brought to tears by what he was communicating without using a word.
The cover is a monochrome drawing of a tall, slim executive male talking on a cell phone. His back is to us, he is mid-step, and he is facing three windows offering a panoramic view of the New York skyline. Just outside his window is a window washer, a common enough occurrance in a high-rise building. The man is doing his job, using his window wiper to remove the dirt and grime from the windows. But what he has done is created one perfectly rectangular clean streak on the glass that resembles a high-rise building, and his window wiper is half-done creating another by its side. In the background, a small plane is flying.
This cover gave me chills. How long did it take Banyai to come up with this concept? Because it is amazing. If you were asked to create a New Yorker cover that implied the absence of the World Trade Center towers three years later, could you have come up with something that subtle, that potent, that stark? It communicates on a level beyond language, a sensory level that looks into an empty room and thinks: absence. Emptiness. And that absence, that lack of something that was there before, perfectly encapsulates how the New York skyline still looks post 9-11.
No comments:
Post a Comment