#Pink houses album cover full#

A simple piece of design can turn that square into something for the ages: the white lines on blue of Kraftwerk’s “Autobahn” “The Modern Lovers”, with its logo that looks like a diner sign flashing by at the side of a highway Peter Saville’s floppy disk mock-up for New Order’s “Blue Monday” (a single rather than an album, but the same size).

#Pink houses album cover full#

(An example appears in the exhibition: “Force It”, by UFO, in which a couple embrace in a bathroom full of taps.) But given the right record, Hipgnosis made the covers that built its reputation: the two businessmen shaking hands, one on fire, on “Wish You Were Here” evokes the mood of dislocation on the record.įascinating though they are, the covers at the Photographers’ Gallery necessarily ignore one great strand of album design, the graphic cover. Yet its stock in trade was either people staring balefully at an inanimate object, or some piece of awful sexism, perhaps combined with a terrible visual pun. So why isn’t that a great album cover?Ĭonversely, the design house Hipgnosis, co-founded by Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell in 1967, is often hailed as the greatest of all cover designers it did all those Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin albums. But they serve their purpose perfectly: the cover of, say, “Reign in Blood” by Slayer more accurately captures the dark mood of the record than any tasteful portrait could have. Those genres have often favoured detailed, fantastical artwork, sometimes explicit or gory in nature, which do not sit neatly alongside black-and-white photos of Miles Davis or an Andy Warhol design (see picture). You will not see anything in this exhibition from the worlds of metal or prog-rock, however. Many of the usual suspects are there: “Physical Graffiti” by Led Zeppelin, “Wish You Were Here” by Pink Floyd, the stunning run of covers Jean-Paul Goude put together for Grace Jones, and others that you have seen in coffee-table books. Even though the exhibition takes care never to claim it is showing the best covers, the act of putting them in a gallery is a validation. “For the Record: Photography and the Art of the Album Cover” gathers together a collection of 200 striking covers-all based on photography, as you might expect-to illustrate different facets of cover design. That much is evident in an interesting exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery in London. Judgments about art are always coloured by factors beyond the work itself, but that is especially true in the case of album covers, which are always partly appraised in light of what lies within the inner sleeve. Often a listener’s feelings about the cover are shaped by the music that lies within: the better the record, the more likely they are to appreciate the art in which it is presented. R arely is an album cover’s quality defined solely by what is printed on that square of cardboard, 12 inches high by 12 wide.