Five images needed to convey "Person of the Year" -- Time Magazine issue December 2014

http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-cover-photographs/

Few people are likely to know the names or recognize the faces of the five men and women who appear on the cover of TIME’s People of the Year issue. They are ordinary people who have made extraordinary sacrifices in 2014 to stem the spread of the deadly Ebola virus in West Africa. “They’re not just saving their own community. They’re saving us too. They’re saving the whole world,” says Jackie Nickerson, the photographer for four of the five the covers.
Together, the covers along with the photographs in the issue by Nickerson and Bryan Schutmaat offer perhaps the broadest portrait yet of Ebola’s frontline fighters–23 of the thousands of people who have risked their lives to stop this epidemic. “There are many others we’re not showing but we wanted a range of the different kind of efforts that are required to fight this fight,” says Nancy Gibbs, TIME’s editor. “Some of them are native to Africa and some of them have come from all over the world and we wanted to capture that across our five covers.”
“Because we’re spotlighting people who are unknown to our readers, which is very rare for Person of the Year, we wanted to make sure that what they do is apparent,” says Radhika Jones, the issue editor for Person of the Year. The photograph of Dr. Jerry Brown, the medial director and general surgeon at the Eternal Love Winning Africa Hospital in Monrovia, Liberia “is an image that takes you immediately to the work that this man is doing. When you look at the whole history of TIME’s Person of the Year covers, there are a lot of presidents, head of states and leaders. This is a very unique image for this franchise, and I think it’s one we will remember for a long time.”
Nickerson traveled from Paris to Monrovia for the assignment. Schutmatt traveled from Amsterdam to Geneva, London and then to the United States to shoot portraits of scientists leading the search for the Ebola vaccine.
http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-cover-photographs/