Total Records: Photography and the Art of the Album Cover

The history of photography is teeming with portraits of musicians made iconic by their album covers: Thelonious Monk by W. Eugene Smith, Miles Davis by Irving Penn, Grace Jones by Jean-Paul Goude, Laurie Anderson by Robert Mapplethorpe. The history of album cover art also includes collaborations between prominent figures, such as Mick Rock and David Bowie, Annie Leibovitz and John Lennon, Lee Friedlander and John Coltrane, Nobuyoshi Araki and Björk, Anton Corbijn and U2, and Robert Frank with the Rolling Stones—not to mention Francis Wolff’s legendary work with Blue Note, the record label he cofounded. Musicians and designers have also sifted through photography’s rich history for powerful photographs to match and keep company with the music enclosed within: Anders Petersen’s classic Café Lehmitz portrait of a man nestling into a woman’s bosom stands in for Tom Waits on the cover of Swordfishtrombones