The New Yorker, February 11 & 18, 2008

For this year’s anniversary issue of The New Yorker, artist Seth reinterpreted Rea Irvin’s classic Eustace Tilley image to produce “Eustace Tillarobama,” a two-headed playing card image that featured the leading Democratic presidential candidates dressed as the New Yorker icon, sharing his famous monocle. Half of the run featured Obama on top and Clinton on the bottom; in the other half, Clinton had the upper hand.

TIME, April 2008

TIME’s Special Environment Issue features an image so ingrained in the collective consciousness of Americans—the raising of the flag on Iwo Jima, taken on February 23, 1945, by AP photographer Joe Rosenthal—that any alteration of that photo would be provocative. But what TIME Art Director Arthur Hochstein created was something entirely new: by replacing the black-and-white American flag with a colorful trees, and by emphasizing TIME’s commitment to the fight against global warming with a bold coverline and the first-ever green TIME logo and border, Hochstein and his team gave the image a more contemporary, urgent meaning while also emphasizing the importance of our current war on global warming. The TIME image outraged some veteran’s groups, but it got the country talking about the historical implications of the environmental crisis and gave new immediacy to the issue.

Vanity Fair, May 2008

For the cover of Vanity Fair’s third annual Green Issue, Madonna—who has been involved in ecological causes and runs the charity Raising Malawi (a volunteer organization helping orphans of the poorest nations)—portrayed a 21st century Atlas, embodying the notion that the fate of the fragile Earth is, quite literally, in our hands. The inspiration for the image came to Editor Graydon Carter from a mid-century fashion magazine cover. Vanity Fair’s Fashion and Style Director Michale Roberts began with several sketches, channeling the fashion cover as well as the 1920s work of Czech photographer Frantisek Dritkol. Then Roberts commissioned London-based set designer Robbie Doig to construct the globe, which was made from polystyrene, resin and plaster, and finished with paint and marble dust; it weighed just under 80 pounds and took 10 days to complete. The globe was suspended from the photo studio ceiling, enabling Madonna to maneuver herself around its entire circumference, and photographer Steven Meisel to shoot his subject from all angles.