100 years of Time magazine: the impact of the first issue and the most iconic covers

TIME, the American magazine famous for its iconic covers and for awarding the coveted title of person of the year, will turn 100 next Friday. To celebrate it, and on the eve of the unveiling of the Women of the Year 2023the journal has published a special issue in which it retraces its first century of existence since the historic first edition of the March 3, 1923.

“This number is, for all of us who work in TIMEextraordinarily special. Publishing 100 years after the birth of our brand in the form of a 32-page weekly is a marker of constancy and change,” they wrote in an editorial. Jessica Sibley there Edward Felsenthalrespectively CEO and editor of the magazine.

The special recalls the impact that the first issue of TIMEwith the “front-page report” on the legendary Republican lawmaker’s upcoming retirement”Cannon “Uncle Joe”.

The launch of TIME It was disruptive for the time, since for the first time a medium that defined itself as “Weekly News Magazine” appeared. Nothing like this existed before, with an ingenious classification of all the news of the world into ordered categories.

The note on Cannon also already had the bold style that will characterize the magazine for the next 100 years. “Never has a man held the position of Speaker of the House,” he wrote. TIME about Cannon, “with less regard for his theoretical impartiality.”

Cannon’s choice for the cover, the magazine explained, reflected the belief of its creators Harry Luce there Britain’s Hadden “that people not only make news, but make history, fate as a personality, and so this week and every week to come for decades, it would almost always be a person or persons playing the cover of TIME”.

A century after this first cover, to celebrate this anniversary, the magazine has chosen a cover composed of 144 pictures selected from over 5,000 issues published to date and which includes at least one cover from each of the past 100 years.

It also includes the 18 U.S. presidents since the founding of TIMEbegining with Warren G. Harding, which appeared the second issue of TIME in 1923. Richard Nixonwho holds the record for covers (55), appears four times.

Iconic covers also appear, such as the one titled “Is God dead?dated April 8, 1966. This was the first cover without an image and is considered one of the most memorable of TIME.

There are also two memorial gates, which mark the death of steve jobs (2011) y Kobe Bryant (2020), and a handful of notable events, since the space shuttle disaster Challenger in 1986 until the attack of the September 11, 2001 in New York, taken by the photographer Lyle Owerko from his Tribeca apartment when he heard the sound of the American Airlines plane crashing into the nearby World Trade Center tower.

Among the covers that TIME cited among its most emblematic are also the Dalai Lama of April 20, 1959, the one on the election of “You” as Personality of the Year, the one who showed the world the mutilated face of the Afghan woman Aisha Mohammadzai in 2010 and the -very controversial- on the breast feeding of 2012.

In the collage for the 100 years there are also large writers (JD Salinger, Ernest Hemingway, Eugene O’Neill), the musicians (Aretha Franklin, Adele, Louis Armstrong, Frank Sinatra, the Beatles, Taylor Swift, Bruce Springsteen, Thelonious Monk, Duke Ellington, Michael Jackson), architects (Frank Lloyd Wright, Buckminster Fuller), athletes (Joe DiMaggio, Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali) and Icons (Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin). There are scientists, thinkers and explorers (Albert Einstein, John Glenn, Jacques Cousteau).

Bonding explained TIMEshows how the artists and photographers used nearly every medium to bring the covers to life: charcoal and gouache portraits, black-and-white portrait and watercolor photography, screen printing, and 360-degree photography.

“Although this image represents less than 3% of all the covers of TIME published,” writes the magazine, “every part of it serves as a reminder of some of the most significant moments of the last 100 years”.

Continue reading: