Cover Me

A reflection on imagery in “Memphis Magazine,” 1976–2026

by

Features

A magazine is a container: of stories and interviews, of advertisements and calendars, of announcements and opinions. In French, un magasin is a shop. That the word — magazine — is used to talk about both periodicals (like this one) and ammunition is no accident. A firearm’s magazine is a container for numerous cartridges that can be fired in succession. A publication like Memphis Magazine is a container for work that can be leafed through quickly — rapid-fire.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover,” people say — but the truth is, you can understand plenty by glancing at a dust jacket. Is this a work of sci-fi (ringed planets, alien technology) or of romance (bright colors, a beach, or even … Fabio)? Is it prestige literary fiction? A mass-market paperback thriller, or a dense historical chronology? The cover likely gives ample clues. Not only that, the look of a cover lodges in the memory; I can call up, in my mind’s eye, dust jacket images of books whose titles might have vanished from my mental card catalog.

No one pretends not to judge magazines by their covers. Since the nineteenth century, periodical publishers have chosen illustrations, and now, more often, photographs, to grace their front shells. For many magazines, the cover image represents or teases the theme of, or a dominant story within, a particular issue. And for many magazine consumers, a passing glance at the cover determines whether they’ll pick up a copy or leave it sitting forlornly on a newsstand or dentist’s waiting-room table. There’s not a brick-and-mortar Memphis Magazine store, but our cover is our shop window: Do you see anything through the glass that compels you to venture inside?

Some of the covers from those years are works of art. Before the days of digital everything, the editors sometimes commissioned artists to paint canvases that would then be photographed and made into covers. Elvis Presley, Fred Smith, Sam Phillips, and many more were made into portraits that became classic Memphis Magazine covers.

Behind the scenes each month, before we publish an issue of this magazine — this container of organized chaos — we evaluate plans for the cover. Often, a small group of editors, and our art director, consider several vastly different directions for the cover: We may weigh two or even three feature stories to showcase, and often, the final decision has more to do with aesthetics than some notion of “importance.” If the art (meaning either photography or illustration) is stronger for one story, we’ll likely select that for the cover, even if another story in the same month’s issue is longer or denser. That’s because we really, really want casual passersby to become readers. We don’t just want you to see us on your dentist’s waiting-room table. We want to be on your table.

For writers and editors — word people, people like me, who make houses out of sentences and dream in paragraphs — becoming aware of how visually our work is construed and consumed can be strange. We spend so much time crafting our sentences, structuring our stories, weaving in quotations, smoothing transitions. Then the story’s published, and most of the commentary has to do with how it looks.

We can fight against this truth — imploring readers to look beyond the pictures and to focus on the words — or we can embrace the power of a good cover, a strong lead image. I’ve come to believe that the best way to persuade people to read what you have to say is to compel them to want to look at the pages in the first place. And that’s best done through visual impressions.

Memphis Magazine has been printing monthly for 49 years and 11 months. In preparation for the magazine’s … quinquagenary? golden jubilee? semi-centennial? … we have been poring over shelves upon shelves of archival issues. What has stood out to me, in this process, is how broadly we’ve ranged. The story of this magazine isn’t a straight line, but an accumulation of layers upon layers, a concatenation of ideas joined together with paper and thread, glue and ink. Within the first 12 months of publication, we had run a cover showing esteemed photographer William Eggleston — and then, two months later, a portrait of a woman in a red-white-and-blue Afro wig, for the nation’s bicentennial — followed a few months later by a deep dive into the Memphis wrestling scene — and, sure, why not, also a cover story about the “psychic boom” featuring a very cartoonish image of a fortune teller.

In those early years, the style felt very, well, ’70s — no surprise there, as it was the ’70s. Our logo at the time was bubbly and round, looking almost like something that could be made out of neon and hung on the side of a building. I adore that old, retro logo, designed by then-art director Fred Woodward.

Some of the covers from those years are works of art. Before the days of digital everything, the editors sometimes commissioned artists to paint canvases that would then be photographed and made into covers. Elvis Presley, Fred Smith, Sam Phillips, and many more were made into portraits that became classic Memphis Magazine covers. Packed away in storage are the originals of many covers, reminders of how tactile and messy this process was, not so long ago.

By the 1980s, many of our covers featured either politicians or entertainers, and the style had grown up into the try-hard, big-hair, aesthetic of the era. We spotlighted Cybill Shepherd, Al Gore, Dick Hackett, Willie Herenton, Jerry Lee Lewis. The bubbly logo was dropped in favor of an italic script (hand-designed by Bill Gregg, a staff designer at the time), and even the color palettes went a little ’80s chintz. There’s a lot of hair spray and shoulder pads. But there was also some very ambitious journalism, including stories on race and poverty in Memphis.

In subsequent decades, the magazine continued to accumulate and shed. To a great extent, our covers, taken collectively, are a flipbook through the history of the city’s hopes and disappointments. We did a series of stories on the Wonders exhibits, now gone by the wayside. For a time, in the festival’s heyday, our writers traveled to Memphis in May’s honored countries and to countries included in Wonders exhibitions for articles that we published. It’s hard to imagine, now, a local, small-market journalist being flown to China or Peru on a press trip, but it happened for our writers.

In more recent years, many of our most memorable visual stories have been part of the Mind’s Eye series: close readings of Memphis photographers’ bodies of work. Tommy Kha, Jamie Harmon, Andrea Morales, Louis Tucker, Houston Cofield, Huger Foote, among others have been featured in Mind’s Eye, granting us not only insight into their creative practices but also access to share their work in print. Richard Alley gets credit for beginning the series with a 2016 profile of Bob Williams. And, apart from the Mind’s Eye series but another example of this magazine’s photographic legacy, Eggleston’s photos were printed on full pages within the May 1976 issue that 1976 magazine — all primary colors and lonely tableaux. The famed photographer’s work was revisited in a March 1994 cover story, and most recently shown again in a lush November 2022 retrospective.

The covers have grown into the contemporary era stylistically, too. The logo we use now is a version of one designed by Hudd Byard around 2008. I asked our art director now, Brian Groppe, to pick a favorite of our several logos. Ever diplomatic, Brian wrote, “Each logo is appropriate for its era,” but allowed that the current logo is his favorite. (For any typeface nerds, Brian went on: “The unique sans serif font Monarch Bold works well in U&lc [upper and lowercase] due to its short ascenders and descenders, i.e. tall lowercase x-height relative to a short uppercase.” Got that?)

There’s something immediately nostalgic about print media. Not because it’s so old-school; reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. No, magazines are nostalgic because of the temporality of their production. By the time an issue of this magazine finds its way into your hands, the people who worked on it have moved on to the next issue, and the one after that. The people we interviewed are thinking about tomorrow, not yesterday. But when we get it really right, the assembled pages feel like a moment in time, crystallized. As we reflect on the past 49 years and 11 months of this magazine, we’re engaged in an activity that’s rather the opposite of our normal process. I often get mixed up about what month it is right now, because so much of my mind is devoted to what’s next. The archives are a permanent(-ish) record, but we’re urging forever forwards.

I’ve come to love the relative impermanence of it all. Whether our current issue is beautiful or moving, humdrum or even embarrassing — there’s another one coming soon. It’s a deeply mortal-feeling medium. By the time you realize where and who you are, you’re somewhere else, growing into someone else, or else you’re nowhere, and that’s that. We don’t get to be overly precious about any particular thing. There’s simply not time. It’s a good enough way to approach more than just magazine publishing: Do your best, but no matter what, keep moving.

Remembering Larry Kuzniewski

No photographer shot more covers for Memphis Magazine than the late, great Larry Kuzniewski. From suites to beaches, Larry captured the colors and personalities that make Memphis so distinctive. He also happened to be our neighbor, living downstairs from the magazine’s office on Tennessee Street for two decades. 

In 2023, our managing editor, Frank Murtaugh, paid tribute to Larry when he announced his retirement. “To call Larry prolific in our early days would be to cheat the word prolific,” wrote Frank. “From 1982 to 1984, 26 out of those 34 covers were shot and shaped by Larry.”

Some of our favorites are shown below.

Larry died in December 2025. We miss him, but we will celebrate his craft for years to come.