The New Yorker magazine is known for its covers with timeless messages and illustrations that at the same time echo the present, as is the case of the number of July 28, in which the marriage composed of the Spanish illustrator Sergio García Sánchez and the colorist Lola Moral portrays the migratory policies of the Trump administration.
On the cover, a crowd from different parts of the world awaits on the border to enter or leave the North American country, with the image of a typical United States airport as a backdrop.
This scene could represent any time in the recent history of the North American country, but the strict antimigration measures of the immigration and customs control service (ICE) promoted by the president, Donald Trump, give another sense to the Enlightenment.
The image has had a great impact, to such an extent that one of the readers sent a letter to the magazine’s writing by changing the current name ‘Journeys’ (roads) to ‘Ellis Island 2025’, referring to what was the most crowded border crossing for several decades.
In an interview with EFE, the marriage assured that he did not want to represent the arrests of the ICE agents and, instead, preferred a more subtle and elegant scene, a style for which the magazine is optimized.
“What we want is to always achieve a balance between ethics and aesthetics. For people to reach that internal violence, it cannot reach it abruptly,” Moral reflected.
For this aspiration to the subtlety and timelessness that The New Yorker seeks on its covers, it is that the ‘sticks’ of watermelon – symbol of the Palestinian flag – and the Harvard University that appeared in the sketch were lost in the final version of the Enlightenment.
“It was already seen as a kind of anecdote that caught too much attention to the rest of the information,” said García Sánchez, which was based on the arrests of ICE to foreign university students for their participation in proportions.
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Spain and EU, ‘Immigrant countries’
The artists saw a clear connection between Spain and the US being countries “constituted by migrants”, according to García Sánchez.
“We felt very identified because in Spain we have been an immigrant people who have received a lot of migration and is constituted by the fusion of many peoples,” he added. “We behave exactly the same as Americans, but with very good words.”
It is also a topic that touches them very closely, since when they were children they had to move already inside or outside Spain. In this sense, Moral said: “The people we move, that we are going to other countries, we do not do it because we want. There is really a need.”
Both reflected on the fact that it is a global and worrying issue promoted by certain political parties, so they underline how “countries need migrants.”
Collaboration with The New Yorker
This is the ninth occasion when the illustrator collaborates with the magazine, being the first in 2021, when he portrayed his most emblematic character, the dandi Eustace Tilley, with a surgical mask, a syringe of the Covid-19 vaccine in the hand and scenes of the pandemic inside.
The New Yorker then contacted the illustrator, although they did not start collaborating until they were “prepared.” Since then, several editions have their signature and, although Moral repeatedly participated as colorist, has not become an official collaborator until this latest edition.
The total creative process of the covers entails “much in advance” and, sometimes, the illustrations are displaced to subsequent editions so that they are consistent with the present and represent “the philosophy of the number.”
Connection with New York
Although both reside in Granada, where García Sánchez also exercises as a professor at the Faculty of Fine Arts of the Public University, marriage is able to capture the essence of the Big Apple, thus drinking “the most signed city on the planet”, represented in multiple films, photographs, writers, etc.
However, for them, the key to a good illustration is “to always turn to it (…) something very personal, something that is like a feeling that puts you in relation to readers,” said García Sánchez.
Some of their famous covers represent a young woman reading a book under the lions that guard the famous library, or the renewal of one of the buildings of the Jullyard Arts Conservatory, in which the artist evoked the memory she had when she saw the series ‘Fama’ (1982).
Its authors anticipate that the next collaboration with the magazine could be published in a very short time, so they will thus experience the adrenaline that, they say, do not feel when collaborating with any other publication.
With EFE information.
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