At least 90% of the book cover photographs on the Covering Photography website/database were originally made as art, or documentation, or journalism, certainly not as fodder for book covers. That said, designers repurpose images as a matter of course; they are just one of the many elements – text, typeface, graphics, etc – that go into the making of a (hopefully) interesting cover. The original photo is often cropped, colored, reversed and/or buffed up with special effects, and pointing out the difference between the image of origin and how it is reused is a key function of this website. One of the more interesting – and sometimes frustrating – aspects of working on Covering Photography is scouring the web in search of the source image: the picture as the photographer took it. In recent years, Artificial Intelligence has become a key player in the manipulation of the original in its transformation from photograph to book cover. AI is also playing an increasingly important role in searching for these source images.

When possible with the covers on this site, I try to provide a link to the original image, which may be located in museum online collections, auction houses or the photographer’s website. Sometimes I’m lucky, and sometimes I come up empty-handed. Google’s “Search by Image” function can be helpful: Throw a picture into it and usually it comes up with some information about who took it and where/when. The problem is that – perhaps as often as not – it comes up with the wrong information. I’m always holding back from posting a few covers because the info I get from AI doesn’t jibe with what I already know about the photo and the photographer.

The Constantine Manos image on the cover of this book of poetry provides a case in point. I screen-grabbed the picture, put it into Image Search, and this is what I came up with:

“The selected image appears to show the photograph “Early to Fish” (1956) by Hong Kong photographer Lin Hsiang Hsiu”.

Click on the link to take a look. Except for the square format of Lin’s photo versus the standard horizontal rectangle of Manos’ 35mm camera, the pictures are remarkably similar. Save for the formatting and the fact that they were made 7 years and 4500 miles apart, they could be variants from the same roll of film.

In an attempt to whittle things down, I added the name “Constantine Manos” to the search criteria, and got this:

“The photograph, ‘Fishermen, Lake Kastoria, Greece 1963’, is by Magnum photographer Constantine ‘Costa’ Manos, from his book, ‘A Greek Portfolio’.”

I happen to own a copy of A Greek Portfolio , so I looked it up. The official title of the photo (which is reproduced on page 35), is Pulling up fishing nets, Volus. The port city of Volus (or Volos) is on the Pagasetic Gulf, 120 miles away from Lake Kastoria.

All this is to say that, while profoundly unimportant compared to the problems that plague our planet today, this little research exercise may be viewed as a microcosmic metaphor for the potential perks and pitfalls of AI.