28 BIBLE, our millennium issue: “the greatest story ever told" retold in images by modern-day artists and photographers. The intent was to make an issue that was visually provocative but not blasphemous or gratuitously shocking. We worked closely with Dr. Royal Rhodes, professor of religion at Kenyon College, who helped us excerpt passages from the King James Bible. Wolfgang Tillmans contributed the Crucifixion; Andreas Gursky’s image of a rave becomes the Exodus; Mary Ellen Mark envisions a modern day Mary and Joseph; and Steven Meisel imagines the Apocalypse in a series of eerily foreboding fashion images inspired by the painter Odd Nerdrum. Visionaire collaborated with industrial designer Philippe Starck to create special packaging for the issue, a molded-plastic “energy sphere."
