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A picture’s worth a thousand covers

Photography on book covers has become so common that most of us don’t even think about the connection between the image being used and the purpose it’s being used for. Not so for Karl Baden, an artist and photographer living in New York. Baden is in the process of compiling and annotating a huge collection of book covers that use photos, the whole thing part of an online archive at Covering Photography:

The idea for “Covering Photography” first occurred to me in 2002. I had fallen into the habit of haunting secondhand bookstores, spending hours searching, mostly without success, for classic photography books I couldn’t afford when I was younger, and are now as rare as hen’s teeth.

While prowling the stacks, I began to notice familiar images from the History of Photography on the covers of novels, textbooks and volumes of poetry; books whose nominal subject matter didn’t necessarily have a literal correspondence with the often iconic photographs that graced their jackets.

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During it’s transformation from photograph to book cover, the original image is often cropped, colored, reversed or otherwise altered to fit the aesthetic intent of the designer or the more practical concerns of the publisher. In some cases the image has been re-staged by another photographer, or even copied into another medium. All this manipulation prompts the question: How is a photograph, initially conceived as an independent aesthetic object, re-used as a visual cipher for a book’s subject, or as an attention-getting sales device; i.e., how does a shift in context affect a photograph’s meaning?

There is no simple answer to this question.

All of this is heady stuff, though sometimes the question of a photo’s cover context is a very simple one, as in the case of, say, Pamela Anderson’s novel Star Struck. (Link not entirely safe for work. Or children. Or adults with a fear of silicone.)

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