Album cover.
As well as looking at these ‘shocking’ images created by different photographers I have been thinking about ways in which photographers who create images like this might get their work seen by the masses because lets face it your not going to remember an image if you’ve never seen it. Then it struck me, Album covers. Ok the music industry is dieing at the moment and the public aren’t buy nearly as may albums as they where 10, 15, 20 years ago but even so images created for album covers get seen by millions and millions of people, if it’s the cover of a ‘popular’ or ‘mainstream’ artist the coverage could be huge. These days even if you don’t by the album the cover images are distributed through the press, in magazines and papers in the form of adverts or reviews, similarly with TV but now increasingly through viral marketing and the internet. For further research I have seen looking into what I consider to be a few of the most famous and provocative album covers that have since gone on to be icon and revered as album covers.
Album cover: Nirvana – Nevermind (1992)
Concept: Robert fisher and Kurt Cobain.
Photographer: Kirk Weddle
The Nevermind album cover depicts a naked baby swimming toward a dollar bill on a fishhook. According to Cobain, he conceived the idea while watching a television program on water births. Cobain mentioned it to his record labels art director Robert Fisher. The record company subsequently stepped in and stop the idea going into production as even they thought that was too graphic, so instead Fisher sent a photographer to a pool for babies to take pictures. Five shots resulted and the band settled on the image of a three-month-old infant named Spencer Elden, the son of the photographer’s friend Rick Elden. However, there was some concern because Elden’s penis was visible in the image. Geffen prepared an alternate cover without the penis, as they were afraid that it would offend people, but relented when Cobain made it clear that the only compromise he would accept was a sticker covering the penis that would say “If you’re offended by this, you must be a closet pedophile”. The immense success of the album mix with this potentially shocking imagery has lead to arguably the most iconic album cover of the 90’s.
Album cover: Marilyn Manson – Mechanical animals
Art director: Paul Brown
Photo: Joseph Cultice
The controversial cover of Marilyn Manson’s 1998 album Mechanical animals has won critical acclaim and numerous awards. The infamous cover photo was the brainchild of long-time Manson photographer Joseph Cultice. At the time of the album release popular internet rumors claimed that Manson had undergo drastic plastic surgery to transform his self in to androgynous, alien look being you see on the cover. The truth is the breasts are prosthetic but Manson is in reality naked and covered head to toe in latex paint. His genitalia are covered by a thin cup of plastic to create the androgynous appearance of the alien figure he calls Omēga. Originally the cover was going to be released with Manson sporting some rather fetching green nipples but the record company made them change them remove the nipples from the final image as they thought I would create to much offence which to be fair with out the nipples it still did. Protesters tried to get the album banned from sale on shortly after its release but as we all know there’s no such thing as bad publicity and the controversy just made the album sell more and more copies the album even reached number one in the American album charts.
Country Life is the fourth album by the band Roxy Music, released in 1974 and reaching #3 in the UK charts. It also their first record to crack the U.S. chart . In 2003, the album was ranked number 387 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the 500 greatest albums of all time. The cover features two scantily-clad models, Constanze Karoli and Eveline Grunwald who Bryan Ferry met when he was in Portugal and persuaded them to do the photo shoot for the albums cover. The cover image was considered controversial in some countries such as the United States, Spain, and The Netherlands, where it was censored for release. As a result in 1975 the album was re-released in America with a different cover shot. Instead of Karoli and Grunwald posed in front of some trees, the reissue used a photo from the album’s back cover that featured only the trees. But because of the controversy it cause it has lead on to the album cover become quite an icon of 1970’s British rock music.
Designer: David king
