黑料不打烊

For the Record: Photography & the Art of the Album Cover celebrates the unique 鈥榦bject d鈥檃rt鈥� that is the Album Cover and reflects upon its role in shaping and making artists - both in front of and behind the camera.

For the Record  brings together over 200 album covers, highlighting the central role photography plays in defining artists and bands, and showcasing some of the most iconic album covers of our times. While many of the 鈥榓rtistes on the covers will be instantly recognisable, the exhibition illuminates the often overlooked and multifaceted contributions of photographers and other visual artists to the identity of the 鈥榮tars鈥� and the labels themselves.

Featuring work from such photographic and artistic luminaries as Andy Warhol, Cindy Sherman, David Bailey, David LaChapelle, Ed Ruscha, Elliott Erwitt, Guy Bourdin, Helen Levitt, Irving Penn, Jeff Wall, Joseph Beuys, Juergen Teller, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Richard Avedon, William Eggleston and more, many of whom had their careers launched through their cover images, the exhibition also looks at the contribution of a range of equally visionary, though perhaps lesser-known artists, photographers, graphic designers and creatives. 

The exhibition is arranged around a series of thematic-led 鈥榗hapters鈥�, presenting the physical covers themselves, and exemplifying both singular and longer-term creative collaborations such as Lee Friedlander鈥檚 symbiotic relationship with Atlantic Records (and including his covers of such greats as Hank Crawford and Ray Charles) and Francis Wolff鈥檚 iconic black and white work with the Blue Note jazz label (which in some cases features the original working prints alongside the covers). The exhibition also considers the significance of the visual iconography adopted by a range of other musical genres.  While the highly stylised graphics of the Hipgnosis design agency exemplified a technicolour, surrealistic, and utopian imaginary world for Pink Floyd, other choices of artwork illustrate how the album cover has repurposed and re-appropriated many of the century鈥檚 anonymous press and social documentary images that have acquired symbolic status beyond their original meaning.  This is especially evident in the series of covers for historic blues recordings released by the Yazoo label in the 1960s, featuring startling documentary images from Jack Delano and Dorothea Lange (amongst others) reflecting the conditions in America鈥檚 deep south.