The Village Voice
My first job in NYC. When it was announced that the print edition would be discontinued in 2017, Robert Newman asked members of the various creative departments through the years to pull together a few covers, features, or images produced during their time to help create a visual history of the Voice.
What surprised me —given all the time that had passed—was how much I recalled, and how oddly immediate everything seemed. Into the rabbit hole I went, and what follows is the result.
What do you do for the issue after a terrorist attack? Especially when all you managed to get out the day it happened was a version of the same disaster-porn shot everybody else used? To give ourselves a little credit, Tuesday was the day the paper normally printed, so we only had about a half an hour window to make the cover switch, throw a knee-jerk headline on it, type up a page of first-person “I was there” coverage, and hit “send." Still it left a bad taste, and a strong desire to do better, if not exactly make things right somehow.
Living in the West Village at the time, the thing I couldn’t shake was how disoriented I was —the Empire State Building was the North pole, and the Towers had been the South. Nobody seemed to love them exactly, but they were like mountains— they were geography. While the Towers were there, they were mostly taken for granted. Once they were gone, you couldn’t help but see them everywhere. All those schlocky little bits of WTC-emblazoned Times Square tourist kitsch — every postcard, snow globe, keychain, ashtray — gained an unexpected emotional resonance.
Stuck between the pulls of sentiment and heartbreak, I realized that there was a way to show something that didn’t exist anymore. I scribbled the notion out on a yellow sticky note on Wednesday, and walked it over to my the Editor of the Voice, Don Forst.
Without saying anything I handed it to Don. He looked at it, placed the note down on his desk and sighed. Our managing editor Doug Simmons and copy chief Brian Parks were standing near Don’s desk. They looked down at the sketch — and then looked away. At some point Brian broke the silence: “So what you’re saying is that you’d like everything to return to the way it was on September 10th?”
“Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying.”
Don sat there for a bit, then just quietly said “Go do it."
Photo Director: Staci Schwartz. Photographed by Andre Souroujon on September 14th.
And now for something completely different: Given that it had been less than a year after September 11th, Richard Goldstein, the editor of our annual Gay Pride package (aka “The Queer Issue”) was intent on the issue having a lighter touch. So compared to previous years that required more rigorous approaches to the subject matter, there was a good-natured silliness to the conceptual proceedings.
Somehow my (apparently long-standing) desire to create a Rose Bowl Parade float merged with art director LD Beghtol’s book of Aubrey Beardsley erotic sketches. We hired a production company in Chelsea to build it: a chicken-wire mesh construction with silk flowers. In order for it to be transportable it was constructed in two parts, the base and the, uh, cylinder at top. We found a great Central Park location, and Photo Director Staci Schwartz nailed the permit by telling the Parks Department it was a “floral arrangement.” **
We used all sorts of tricks (a dog as a prop, et cetera) to amp up the silliness and play with scale, and while it all worked nobody really wanted to stop, so we kept trying "one more thing." The photographer, Greg Miller, had earlier noticed that down along the shoreline of the nearby pond there was a group of people landscape painting. He casually approached one of them and surprisingly (or not so surprisingly if you know Greg’s powers of persuasion) she agreed to pretend to paint our not-so-little art project: Voilà!
** It wasn’t not true. The Parks Department wasn’t super-happy afterwards (til we gave them prints of the photo)
I had been trying to absorb a fairly heady feature story about the value of talk therapy versus more medication-based approaches. And having failed to do so, I was trying to get it out my mind and talk about more cool and fun things over beers with Keith Campbell. Keith had been at Entertainment Weekly and was filling in for AD Minh Uong, who was on paternity leave. Keith had been seeing a wholly different set of artists than we had, and at some point in passing said, “Yeah, and there was this guy who does these crazy portraits made out of beans”.
“Huh. Well, that’s weird."
20 minutes later: “Do you think that guy could work in pills instead of beans?” Illustration by Jason Mecier
If we were creative and careful we could occasionally string together enough resources for some ambitious projects. For this eight-part series about the toll HIV was taking on Africa, our budget realities meant that the writer, Mark Schoofs, had to be the primary photographer as well. Much of the visual heavy lifting was centered around illustration as a result, with cover and feature-leading artwork being more conceptual to enhance Mark’s on-the-ground visual reportage.
This image, with its very graphical framing — the barren tree as the only object above the horizon line, with the children “underground” below it and isolated from each other — could have easily been too chilly for its own good. Fortunately the artist, Patrick Faricy, used local neighborhood kids that he knew as figure models rather than relying on sourced imagery, and the direct naturalism of their poses very much helped the children (the primary point of this story after all ) exist as more than just page elements.
The Voice won the 2000 Pulitzer in International Reporting for this series.
And now for something completely... yeah, this is pretty silly. Extra points for Publisher David Schneiderman saying, "Well if you're going to embroider the whole thing, you have to do the logo too." Thanks David. Embroidery art by Margaret Cusack
The more things change.... Ugh. A terrific story by Peter Noel helped us set the feeling of claustrophobic tension and dread in this piece. Illustration by Christopher Nielsen
This was the first real test of a brutally simple feature approach (seen in more developed form in the Freud spread above) that cleared the decks of any decoration, while using the negative space to give a conceptual twist to the headline. A story about competing theories over the cause of an airline disaster, the key part of the headline was allowed to descend into the ocean like the plane fragments.It took three separate meetings to get the layout approved, and even when it finally got the go-ahead, the editors still called it “disturbingly stark."
Success.
"So, what was the least subtle cover you ever did ?"
Glad you asked! It's one that might also be the most subtle in an odd way.
Ah, Bush fatigue. Seems almost charming now. We'd been banging the drum on this endless beat of how much W sucked for what seemed like eternity, and the bludgeoning impact of weekly tabloid repetition was taking its toll on me, much less the overall readership. When there was a plan for yet another Bush-centric cover, I was actually at a loss. Particularly because this time around there wasn’t as solid of a story angle as we usually had, so it seemed more about feeding red meat to a base that was... probably doing okay in the protein department at that point.
So I decided to try something so ridiculously blunt and over-the-top it would cast a shadow over any similar tries for quite a while. It was the issue before Halloween. A plan came together. But in order for it really stick and not be shrugged off as just another political-cartoon grotesquerie it had to be rendered as beautifully as possible.
We had done one project before with Alex Ross, but this had a whole other layer of difficulty, since so many elements had to come together precisely. He delivered: The “hot” overhead lighting, the Bela-Lugosi-hand reference, the arc of Liberty's punctured neck, the fact that there are actually no visible fangs.
Subtle!