Published by The Hospital Club
Most magazine covers are lazy thinking at its worst.
There's a simple formula: if it's a famous girl, remove some of her clothes. If it's a famous guy, put him in a suit. Or, sometimes, the other way around. Surround them with headlines from other stories, in a desperate grab for a sale. Rinse. Repeat.
If your photo is a little more pouty than most, or a little more out of focus than the others, then you might win an industry award, the shortlists for which are made up of the same old names every year: two New Yorkers, one Vogue, a GQ, an Elle, one The Economist, two Valiums, and one boring parade of predictability.
All of which misses where the truly remarkable work happens - outside the mainstream, where print's true pioneers ply their fervent trade.
And so, I bring you an alternative top ten list of great magazine covers from 2010, each one a remarkable, eye-clawing image that sears itself in your brain and actually makes you think.
Brand Eins is an independent German business magazine that tackles big issues in strikingly original ways. The headline on this cover reads "Bring us some new faces." Or, presumably, the ape will bite your head off.
Industrie is a niche magazine about fashion's murky innards, filled with images and stories that would make Vogue blush. "Hey, Marc Jacobs has agreed to be our cover star. Why don't we ask his attractive sister to pose for it instead?" You can certainly see the family resemblance.
idN is a highly respected design magazine out of Hong Kong. Its editions are themed, polemical - and it chooses its words carefully.
For its countercultural issue, surf/skate/snowboard magazine Huck turned its magazine into an exercise in debranding: the entire cover was printed on a giant sticker. Peel it off, and draw your own damn cover underneath. Not sure if The Man will care, but it certainly turns each copy into a limited edition.
Granta is a famous and well-respected literary magazine. But they didn't just... did they? Doing a Sex Issue is the oldest cheap trick in the furry box, but with this explicit visual statement connecting sex and money, their 110th issue - the first under editor John Freeman - certainly got tongues wagging.
I mentioned the formula earlier on: choose a beautiful model, light him perfectly, shoot an immaculate image, surround him with text. You might have gathered that Roomservice isn't your usual call to the front desk. This magazine about "real life transactions" is filled with photos of people who they paid via eBay to wear, dress their baby in, draw on their forehead, and in one case tattoo on their leg the name and website of the magazine itself. It's a reflection on modern transactions, found imagery, and mercenary online bidding. Congratulations, you have won this auction. Just don't stare, he doesn't like it when you stare.
A Britney cover is a Britney cover. Unless of course you are Pop magazine, and you commission otaku pop artist Takashi Murakami to style the shoot. The result is a bizarre, creepy play on her Lolita-esque media image, all wrapped up in an obscure protest against the Japanese uproar surrounding a manga comic called "My Wife is Grade Schooler". Who is more perfect to play a controversially sexualized Grade Schooler than BS? Kudos to her for going for it, too.
Bidoun is an unusual contemporary arts magazine about the Middle East, published in New York. For their Winter issue, they decided to use a stack of photographs they found in a Cairo flea market. Not to reproduce, or scan, or make a collage out of them, mind - each copy of their 5,000 print run had a different actual vintage photograph stapled to it. Some received passport photos, others family portraits, still others faded snapshots of soldiers showing off. Every one unique, strange, and directly connecting the reader to the function and use of imagery from another place and time. Mission accomplished.
A Guide is a curious magazine about showcasing a Vienna that's far from the waltz and, erm, Ultravox. This means nothing to me, but their Spring issue featured a story about a Spanish Riding School in the city, illustrated with a cover image that I can't get out of my head. Who was that masked horse?
Fortune magazine is about as establishment as you can get, but this is the cover they didn't run. Established cartoonist Chris Ware was asked to draw an image for their 500th edition. The result was a damning indictment of American capitalism and hypocrisy. They never ran it, so making it ineligible for all mainstream competitions, but for me, it's still one of the covers of the year. See a detailed version, with all its satire laid bare, here.
See the article on The Hospital Club website
