Earlier this month, workers with the French street artist JR (previously) covered a plaza in Manhattan's Flatiron district with a giant, wheat-pasted photograph of a guy walking. It was 20-year-old immigrant and Brooklynite Elmar Aliyev in mid-stride. The image was only up for a day, and almost no one noticed. But it would go on to create one of the most inventive New York Times magazine covers of recent memory.

The cover is a commentary on the invisibility of immigrants, a theme JR has previously explored. "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 NYTimes writes. The French artist photographed several different immigrants before landing on Aliyev, who came to New York from Azerbaijan last August after winning the green card lottery.

via FastCo