In our last post we spoke about Matt Willey’s latest venture with the new magazine Avaunt. Matt took on the role of art director at The New York Times Magazine in December of last year and coincidentally the first special issue of the magazine that he worked on was The Walking Issue. An issue that featured the work of fellow OFFSET speaker JR on the cover.
As one of the most ambitious covers to date the issue depicted the 150-foot high image of an Azerbaijani waiter pasted onto the plaza in front of New York’s Flat Iron Building. The subject of immigration has intrigued JR for some time. As well as the Parisian artist himself being an immigrant, he’s lived in New York on and off for the past four years, he’s also been exploring immigration in his work, with his most notable piece, Unframed, taking over the abandoned hospital on Ellis Island last year.
In an interview with Creative Review, design director, Gail Bichler, said that the magazine had wanted to work with JR for some time and this seemed like a perfect opportunity. Kathy Ryan, director of photography, added that they ‘liked JR’s poetic notion of conveying the invisibility of many of the anonymous immigrants who make up the fabric of our city’ and the necessity of depicting a walking figure as the cover image fit in seamlessly with the artist’s most recent work.
After some location and people scouting, immigrants who had come to live in New York within the past year, the twenty year-old, Elmar Aliyev was chosen to be the cover star because JR liked the walk he swung his arms as he walked. JR and a crew of twenty people began pasting the 62 strips of paper that made up the entire image in the early hours of the morning to be ready when the sun came up.
As New York pedestrians began to walk over the massive black and white image they did just as JR had predicted and walked over the pasting without even noticing it. On their site, Jake Silverstein, editor-in-chief of The New York Times Magazine, describes how JR went up in a helicopter above the city when the light was just right to capture the cover image as a ‘a gloriously massive portrait of one of the city’s 3.1 million immigrants, unseen by many of the people passing him on the street’.
By 9:30pm that same day, a water truck had already been brought in to wash the image away, however, JR and The New York Times weren’t finished yet as additional images of other immigrants had been taken for the magazine interior. These were pasted around the city and a map of their locations was revealed online here.
Just starting a long night of pastings in the streets of New York… One down… #walkingnewyork
A photo posted by @jr on
Matt Willey developed a special typeface for the issue. Timmons NY is used throughout for bold headlines that accompany the striking street photography of Lee Friedlander and a photo-essay by Christopher Griffith.
This typeface is the second, along with MFred, that Matt has donated to the Buy Fonts Save Lives initiative and you can support the cause here.
Feeling inspired? Watch JR’s motivating talk from OFFSET 2013.