Behind the Making of Our Walking New York Cover

For this project, we decided we’d photograph recent immigrants and paste their images on the city’s streets, where they and other immigrants are often invisible. The pasting would be made in the heart of Manhattan, on Flatiron plaza, the triangle of pavement between Fifth Avenue, Broadway and East 23rd Street.

Earlier this month, JR photographed 16 people who arrived in New York within the last year and made their portraits while they walked down the streets of NoLIta. (Some of these portraits can been seen here.) For the cover, we zeroed in on Elmar Aliyev, a 20-year-old waiter at Old Baku, an Azerbaijani restaurant on Ditmas Avenue in Brooklyn. Elmar immigrated to the United States from Azerbaijan last August after he won the green-card lottery. He likes to walk in Central Park and around the Plaza, locations from his favorite movie, "Home Alone 2.” JR liked the way Aliyev swung his arms when he walked.

Continue reading the main storySlide Show

The Cover Stars

Aliyev’s picture was then printed on 62 strips of paper. On April 11, JR and his 20-person crew took these strips to Flatiron plaza and began affixing them to the ground at 4 a.m. The pasting took about three and a half hours and resulted in a 150-foot-tall image of Aliyev striding eastward. The sun came up. Pedestrians began to wander over Aliyev. Just as JR had predicted, they often walked right over him without even noticing.

To make out the image, you had to be high above. In the middle of the day, when the angles of shadow were favorable, JR went up in a helicopter and photographed the pasting, with all the cheerful and untidy street life of an early spring day in New York City happening on and around it.

That image is the one you see on the cover of the magazine — a gloriously massive portrait of one of the city’s 3.1 million immigrants, unseen by many of the people passing him on the street.

The sun went down. At 7:45 p.m., a water truck arrived to power-wash the sheets of paper off the plaza. By 9:30 p.m., Aliyev’s image was gone.

You can see a time-lapse video of this entire process above.

ake Silverstein is editor in chief of the magazine.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.

(nytimes.com)