INTRODUCTION

Iranian president responded to a question about Iran’s executions of homosexuals by
saying, “In Iran, we don’t have homosexuals like in your country. In Iran, we do not have
this phenomenon.” To comment on either of these news events individually could have
amounted to publishing a political cartoon—Ahmadinejad in drag, say, or an elephant at
a urinal. Political cartoons have their place; they’re very direct, but in their need to label
each representation, they often lack the complexity we look for in a cover.

Blitt’s image goes beyond “potty humor”: The open newspaper gives context and
serves as a fig leaf, the tiled floor gives the perspective of a Vermeer painting, and
Ahmadinejad’s puzzled expression, like a laugh track, provides the viewer with an entry
point. This image doesn’t target Iran’s nuclear ambitions or homophobia. Rather, it asks
us to see the Iranian president as a fallible politician, who either does not see or chooses
not to see what is right at his feet.

WHEN THE WORLD IS ESPECIALLY GRIM, the professional compulsion to find the right
image can be cathartic. Like me, the artists I work with appreciate the opportunity to
work in the face of disaster, even if we know that an image alone can’t heal a case of
the flu, much less a nuclear meltdown in Japan or an earthquake in Haiti. Just bearing
witness is a release. But on September 11, 2001, I suddenly found myself without the
means, without the distance, to say anything at all. That morning, I saw the first plane
ram into the World Trade Center. Art and I ran downtown to get our fourteen-year-old
daughter from where she’d just begun high school at the foot of the towers. The three of
us watched the second tower fall in excruciating slow motion. Not long after, I was back
in my office, trying to find a cover for the magazine. It felt impossible. I resisted the task
with every fiber of my being. Images seemed suddenly powerless to help us understand
what had happened. The only solution I could find was to run no cover at all—an
all-black cover. I called Art to tell him that I was proposing an all-black cover, and he
suggested adding in the two towers, black on black. From my first unedited impulse
emerged a cover (overleaf ) that in its simplicity and sobriety managed to express a feeling
that had felt unexpressible. Borrowing one of the most abstract, nonrepresentational
techniques of modern art, Ad Reinhardt’s black on black, the
cover conveyed something about the unbearable loss of life, the
sudden absence in our skyline, the abrupt tear in the fabric of
reality. A colleague later told me he felt the issue we published
that week had renewed our readers’ trust in the magazine; I know
it renewed my own trust in the power of images.

I TEND TO THINK THAT THE THOUSANDS OF WORDS each picture
is proverbially worth are better left unspoken. I tell artists that
their image isn’t ready until it can be shown without a caption.
Cartoons freely mix metaphors and part of their strength in
breaking through the verbiage is that their impact is hard to

Above: a cover by Lorenzo Mattotti, commemorating the
50th anniversary of the Nagasaki and Hiroshima
bombings. Below: RAW artist Gary Panter sketched
from his Brooklyn roof as the towers burned,
September 11, 2001.

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