The dawning of the age of Photoshop

Kurt Andersen has posted a comprehensive gallery of covers from Spy , the hugely influential New York satirical magazine that he co-founded with Graydon Carter . The early ones breathe a concentrated essence of late-1980s graphic design – I think the style has since come back into fashion and gone out again – but the visible development, as Andersen says, is in digital photomanipulation. When they began, it was "newly possible ... but difficult and incredibly expensive"; you can trace their growing addiction to it, and their growing ambition with it. But now that people can produce the same sort of work for the sake of a blog comment, it's not easy to recapture the excitement... My colleague Stephen Brook tells me he still has his collected copies at home. (Via the Boston Globe's Braniac blog .)