In 1992, The New Yorker published its first full-page photograph, a 1963 image of Malcolm X by Richard Avedon. Tonight, “Beyond Words: Photography in The New Yorker” opens at Howard Greenberg Gallery, chronicling the history of photography in our pages, from that Avedon portrait up through this past year. The show is curated by our former Visuals Editor, Elisabeth Biondi, who left the magazine this spring after fifteen years of directing the photography that has appeared in our pages. (In March, we asked New Yorker photographers about their favorite shoots for Elisabeth, and in June we published a selection of images from a show of New Yorker Fiction photographs that Elisabeth curated.)
“It has been a great opportunity to dig up some of the incredible historical images we’ve published that might not otherwise see the light of day, and a chance to reflect on the diversity of photography we’ve been able to print,” Elisabeth told me. “In the magazine, the photographs often play second fiddle to the words they accompany. This has been an opportunity to show that these images can stand by themselves—that they are strong enough to have their own identity and power.”
Here’s a selection from the show.
