Front pages of The New York Times from 2000-2019 © NYT
Some people collect coins, others magnets. And some people, like DPI Professor Lorie Novak, collect hardcopies of the New York Times.
Her Above The Fold project was featured in Vogue Italia.
No Images on the Front Page: The New York Times During the Pandemic
Author: Di Rica Cerbarano
Cerbarano writes:
Getting lost in my wonderings on visual representations of Covid-19, I came across Above The Fold, a research project by Brooklyn-based artist Lorie Novak, which helped me to better frame the phenomenon. Novak has been doing meticulous work of archiving and cataloging the covers of The New York Times since 1999. Currently in her studio she has collected over 8,000 front page sections of The New York Times and has divided them into categories suggested by the photographs that appear above the fold. Her visual analysis results in a sculptural installation comprised of 34 stacks of newspapers of varying heights, with each stack showcasing the frequency of the topics covered.
In that same interview with Cerbarano, Novak comments on her motivations behind the project: "In the constantly changing digital news cycle online, we are barraged with images. Daily picking up The New York Times each morning at my front door, I must contemplate just the one image that was chosen to convey the day’s news and wonder why this one.”
Novak adds that:
"Graphs have been very prevalent during the Covid-19 pandemic. And although all the graphics contained important information, most did not stay with me like an image can,” she says. “Anyway, seeing 1,000 names standing in for the 100,000 deaths covering the entire front page was very emotional. It is hard to imagine how a photo could have captured this."
Cerbarano ends the article on a thoughtful note. "Novak took the words out of my mouth and hearing this from her, who has been studying the photographs that appeared on the covers of The New York Times for 21 years, floored me. I still don’t have a clear answer to my doubt whether photography has perhaps been overtaken by graphic in telling the evolution and the consequences of Covid-19," Cerbarano writes.