![]() Photography has opened incredible doors until then and the LP covers have taken on the role of icon, a way to offer an immediate “recognition” not only of the face of a singer, musician, rock band, but also of a broader and more distinctive style: the aesthetic sense that pervades this communication, which is halfway between the purity of a musical concert, the artistic inspiration and the rules of marketing and communication: art and marketing meet and everything, for a single moment, brings us back to the Renaissance. Through this shot, we begin to understand the intrinsic value of the relationship between photography and graphics. Here, therefore, Cooper transforms the Stones into what, in the past, would have been a tableau vivant, an allegorical disguise, such as to confuse the real and the imaginary, as it happened in the “artificial paradises” of Baudelaire’s, and fil rouge through the Sixties and Seventies. The change of register is clear and, perhaps, at that moment, more than music Mick Jagger and his companions were interested in composing a recognizable, albeit transformist, ironic image in what were, after all, psychedelic years. And if Rock was called “the Devil’s Music”, in ’67 the British band recorded the album Their Satanic Majesties Request, for the cover of which they wanted Michael Cooper, an English photographer messenger of the new rock wave of the United Kingdom. ![]() ![]() Bailey’s language clearly outlines, through lights and shadows, the Rolling Stones, presenting them to the world according to a short circuit capable of unhinging the preconception on the nascent rock and roll, framing on the cover five “perfect British boys”, leaving the rest all to be revealed, below that surface. David Bailey and his lens immortalize the band – in truth the shot is previous, but on the world-wide released albums all information was deliberately eliminated. As in the previous one, the members choose a precise path to follow: remove the group name from the cover and focus the mise en scène exclusively on their appearance, on their faces, real icons of a new faith, the musical one. It’s 1965 and the British rock band, The Rolling Stones, releases their second studio album of the same name. Michael Cooper, The Rolling Stones, Their Satanic Majesties Request, 1967 Yes, because the image of a cover was – and is – identity research and its affirmation “portrait”, real or figurative, of a band, of a singer, of a different and new message. So here comes a great innovation: if the covers of classical music albums were similar to those of academic books, if the jazz covers were proposed as introspective portraits, those of rock had to be strong, contain the energy of a concert, the anger of lyrics that desecrated the status quo and bring out the will of rebellion typical of the genre. ![]() It is a “screaming” photo, capable of expressing itself for synaesthetic perception: from the image, in fact, one can almost hear the voice of Elvis, the sound of his guitar and sense the movements of his body. “Red” Robertson, in a topical and extremely symbolic moment of an exhibition. The majors had well understood this potential and, for example, the Jazz scene was the first to create its own iconic communication, allowing the covers of the albums to be a visual translation of an imago mentis or the complex emergence of the motions of the soul, typical of its sounds and its interpretations.īut Rock had another spirit and if you wanted to define a departure from this imaginary path, you probably would have to start in 1955, when a very young Elvis Presley released his first album and was caught by William V. However, to reach the Rock soul of this exploration, one has to step down a few positions – just like in the charts – outlining the contours of what I dared to define PhotoRock, a journey through the Art Covers that defined the imagery of this music genre in the world.Īs already clarified by Perna, the role entrusted to the cover image of a record, from the second half of the 20th century, coincided with a wider recoding of the aesthetic, of media and commercial language of the musical universe, understood as a melting pot for transmedia, where artistic and aesthetic intents would dialogue, relate and create a completely new grammar. One of the main recognitions of the link between auteur photography – bad definition, I know – and the covers of records, in Italy, is undoubtedly the one carried out by Raffaella Perna, in her essay ‘Grandi fotografi a 33 giri’, where the reflection is centred on a sort of epitome that has embraced visions and musical genres. RED Robertson, Elvis Presley, 1955 by Azzurra Immediato
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