New York Magazine's amazing Sandy cover

New York Magazine’s Hurricane Sandy issue has an amazing cover photo. And they borrow my headline.

New York Magazine cover, Nov 3, 2012. Photo by Iwan Baan for New York Magazine

It is the kind of image that puts a lump in your throat. It’s like a Turner landscape painting, but all too real, and made for the post-Millennium techno-and-climate-age. Interestingly, the photographer, Iwan Baan, may not be a household name, but he is very well known in architectural circles for his excellent architectural photography, in which he often eschews the typical tendency for formal, highly-composed, dramatically-lit spaces, usually devoid of people (or, if peopled, usually just as stylized props), for much more ephemeral, of-the-moment, sexy-and-playful, dynamic, and equally, if not more so, dramatic depictions of the lived spaces of design.

Baan has often captured the humanity, the social life, the meaning, of the best designed and non-designed spaces. It is not so surprising that he is the one to capture the human cost of Sandy, even from thousands of feet out. Not necessarily in the photo, but in our collective visceral response to it.