Covering Photography
The idea for Covering Photography began in 2002, while I was spending a great deal of time in secondhand bookstores looking for photography books. I began noticing familiar images from the history of photography appearing on novels, textbooks, poetry collections, memoirs, and other books whose subjects did not always correspond literally to the photographs used on their covers.
That recurring encounter led me to collect examples and to think about the relationship between cover and content: what happens when a photograph originally made as an independent image becomes a visual cipher for a book, a metaphor for its subject, or an attention-getting sales device? Over time the collection grew to more than 2,500 volumes and came to span much of the history of the medium, from nineteenth-century photography through established contemporary practitioners. It also includes photographically based work by people better known in other fields, including artists and writers.
The move from photograph to book cover can alter an image substantially. It may be cropped, colored, reversed, retouched, re-staged, or combined with typography in ways that redirect its meaning. Sometimes the connection between image and book is direct; in other cases it is highly metaphorical. The point of the archive is not to judge the ethics or quality of those transformations, but to make them visible and available for study.
Boston College began supporting the original database and website in 2005. This site continues that project in a simpler form designed for long-term independent maintenance. The collection can now be explored from the Browse page, where records can be narrowed by photographer, author, publisher, designer, book genre, photo genre, group or movement, and publication year.
My hope remains that the archive offers an alternative way to think about the intersection of photographic history, literature, popular culture, publishing, and graphic design. Corrections, additional identifications, and suggestions are welcome through the contact information below.
— Karl Baden
Portions of the original project introduction were published in Eye Magazine, Issue No. 59.
Collection Parameters
Covering Photography is a selective collection, not a complete census of photographs used on book covers. Its shape reflects the collector’s knowledge, interests, and access. It is much stronger in twentieth-century photography than in nineteenth-century material, and American and European photographers are represented more heavily than many other regions and traditions.
The collection concentrates primarily on books produced for a broad reading public: trade editions, paperbacks, novels, poetry, criticism, biography, memoir, textbooks, and similar publications. Limited editions and artists’ books made principally for collectors generally fall outside that scope. Established photographers are naturally well represented; the inclusion of younger and less widely published image-makers is necessarily more selective.
Each record describes the particular edition pictured here. Its publication year, publisher, and designer therefore may differ from those of the book’s first edition. When a single book has several relevant images—such as a back cover, spine, flap, or full spread—they appear together as additional views. When the same underlying photograph is used on different books, those books are connected under Also Using This Photograph.
Searching and Browsing
The Browse page is the best place to explore the collection systematically. Filters are available for Photographer, Author, Publisher, Designer, Book Genre, Photo Genre, Group / Movement, and Publication Year.
- Selecting more than one value within a single filter broadens that category. Choosing two photographers, for example, shows covers associated with either photographer.
- Combining different filters narrows the results. A Photographer selection combined with a Publisher selection shows records matching both.
- Publication Year refers to the edition pictured in the archive, not necessarily the book’s original publication year.
- The general site search is most useful for book titles and words appearing in record text. For people, publishers, genres, and movements, the Browse filters are usually more precise.
- Collaborative credits may appear as a combined entry rather than as separate names.
- A designer credit may occasionally refer to the design of the book as a whole rather than specifically to the cover; where that distinction is known, it is noted in the record.
- Photograph titles and dates sometimes vary among publications and reference sources. The archive uses the title and date judged most useful for identification.
Filtered Browse pages have shareable URLs, so a particular combination of filters can be bookmarked or sent to another reader. Names and subjects shown on individual cover records also link to archive pages that gather all matching covers.
Contact
Comments, corrections, additional identifications, and suggestions for the archive are welcome.