Likewise, the Memphis cult band Big Star’s use of their fellow southerner William Eggleston’s famous red ceiling (Greenwood, Mississippi, 1973) for their 1974 album Radio City. (Intriguingly, the man in the photograph bears a resemblance to the young Tom Waits, both physically and in terms of the beatnik-barfly image Waits once projected.)Īnother photograph that effortlessly evokes the music is Cat Power’s use of an Emmet Gowin portrait for Headlights – the boy’s rapt expression at one with Power’s dreamy, dislocated songs.
#Cheryl ann pituch iconographer blog series
That was how Anders Petersen’s picture of an embracing couple from his gritty series Cafe Lehmitz ended up on the cover of Rain Dogs by Tom Waits, an almost perfect reflection of the melancholic music therein. It traces pop’s relationship with photography using album sleeves that span the history of vinyl recordings, and includes work by pioneering photographers who were either commissioned by labels to shape the identity of an artist or else allowed existing images to be used, often at the musician’s request. Man Ray’s proposed cover for the Stones is one of the highlights of a sprawling, but always intriguing, exhibition at Les Rencontres d’Arles called Total Records: The Great Adventure of Album Cover Photography. Radio City by Big Star, which uses William Eggleston’s classic red ceiling shot Radio City by Big Star, with William Eggleston photography Impressed with the photo, Hamersveld took Frank’s work and turned it into the famous album cover that we all know and love. Hamersveld had already worked with the Beatles and Hendrix and had already designed the classic poster for the 1966 surf documentary The Endless Summer, but Hamersveld knew right away that Frank’s photo, which he found among his many American outtakes, was destined to be used for this new album. However, his tattoo parlor photo caught the attention of John Van Hamersveld, who was hired by the Stones to put together the album package.
You can see more footage of those sessions here. of LA that they were supposedly exiled from, and those photos are all on the album’s back side where the band looks just as strange as the freaks from Frank’s photo. It had to be perfect.įrank was originally meant to shoot the band as they walked along the seedy Main St. The album’s cover had to reflect this feeling of joyful isolation, grinning in the face of a scary and unknown future. Jagger wanted its album cover to reflect the band as runaway outlaws using the blues as its weapon against the world. Their new album was something unlike anything they’ve done yet, something raw and uniquely American. In 1972, Mick Jagger reached out to Frank and ask him to come to the Bel Air villa, the Los Angeles home where Mick and his band was staying while they finished their new album.
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