Hasta La Ideas

Photo: Kira Pollack

This Sunday, the New York Times Magazine will publish Obama’s People, a special edition featuring 52 full-page photographs of the new power elite, photographed by Nadav Kander

In an editor’s letter on the NYT website, Gerald Marzorati explains that the project was inspired by a 1976 edition of Rolling Stone which featured 73 portraits of the then-power elite, shot by Richard Avedon. “We, like many of our readers — like most Americans, it seems fair to say — sensed something eventful and potentially far-reaching about the election and the challenges the new president and his team would immediately face. Why not take account of this with portraits of those whose character and temperament and bearing may well prove consequential in the coming months and years?” Marzorati says.

So the magazine’s editor of photography Kathy Ryan (below, right. Photo: Kira Pollack) commissioned Kander, with whom she has worked extensively, to take the portraits in mid-December and earlier this month in Chicago and Washington. The results will make up the largest collection of images by one photographer that the New York Times has ever published.

The images, and behind-the-scenes shots are also available to view at the NYT website.

Photo: Felicity McCabe

Photograph: Arianne Teeple