This Is Also Not A Photograph

Sometimes, you strike when the iron is hot.  And by strike, I mean “type” and by “when the iron is hot” I mean “when I’m drunk walking home from the bar.”  That’s the particular moment when the myriad orbiting ideas in my head coalesced into this piece, and when I clumsily started typing notes about it.  Thanks to Scott and Mark and Tyler at Pitchfork for letting me publish and helping me polish.

I’d been thinking about album covers as possessing a unique kind of rhetorical force since starting to follow No Caption Needed, a blog run in part by John Lucaities, a professor in my department, and designed to accompany and build from the book of the same name.  But it wasn’t until I read this post (excerpted in full in the piece), by Christy, a recent Bloomington transplant and all-around cool chick (this is her new blog–see what I mean), that everything clicked.  I ran into her at a show, I was drunk, we chatted about the post, I stumbled home and everything hits at once.  A few more conversations, a few books flipped through, and it basically wrote itself the week after the 4th of July.

Yes, it’s the other thing I was working on when writing my prospectus, which you may or may not have figured out if you read this post.

The piece might tempt a tl;dr, but I hope you give it a shot.  I basically cover three domains that I see intersecting on these photos-as-album-art: the aesthetic predecessors (Jandek and William Eggleston) who allow everyday snapshots such as these to circulate as objets d’art; the music (or certain music) itself that also reflects a larger sociological/cultural compulsion overlapping significantly with the ideas represented in these photos; and the technologies and technoculture that greatly facilitate the way we see them as nostalgic objects.

There’s tons of stuff that didn’t make its way into the piece, for obvious reasons.  I’ll chunk them below.

–I didn’t include the Sleigh Bells or Tanlines covers inter alia, because they’re not the same thing.  Scanned images from publications (and altered, in the Sleigh Bells case–looks like it’s from a yearbook), are public, which sort of does away with the privacy ideas rampant in the other ones.  Yet this idea is something I also chatted with Chris about, and which he and Ryan (and Panda Bear, and earlier, Robert Pollard) are obviously big fans of.  As with Polaroids, scans from old magazines, particularly of the rich Kodachrome stock from mid-20th century National Geographics or the hazy retro-futuristic patina of Omni (ahem) give the same sense of tactility and grain when surrounded by the sharp lines of a web browser.  It’s the same ahistorical, “found” sense I get when I listen to mp3s from GvsB or Altered Zones, which makes sense.

–In terms of songs that negotiate nostalgia well, but which I couldn’t shoehorn into the piece (though on an early draft I tried), there’s well, all of Village Green Preservation Society, but primarily “Picture Book” and (especially) “People Take Pictures of Each Other.”  And the refrain from “Sound of Silver” is also a nice rebuke to the overwhelming sense of childhood regression so omnipresent in indie these days.

–I could have talked about Jamie Livingston, the Impossible Project, the “make your own indie album cover” memes, Harmony Korine, Marc’s great cassette piece (which I swear to god I’m just now seeing has a title almost identical to my own.  Ha.), Pitchfork’s own A>D>D series, and so on and so forth.  But.

–I wanted to write a bunch more about the connections between music and visual culture, and the rituals associated with album art and imagination, etc.  But I have a feeling there may be a venue where I can do that soon

–I didn’t use the word “retro” once, I think.

–This is Virginia Heffernan’s article, which didn’t get linked in the piece.  Here’s Warhol’s Polaroid book, too.  The Trubek quote at the top of the second page is from Jandek on Corwood, a well-meaning and very informative if not necessarily overly compelling documentary.

–One night I went a little nuts reading about Edwin Land, who messed around and eventually invented Polaroid.  It’s a cute story that’s sort of DIY and punk as fuck–dropping out of high school, moving to NYC, breaking into Columbia at night to use their facilities.

–If you want to read more academic-style stuff about nostalgia and culture, there’s Appadurai’s Modernity at Large (chapter titled “Consumption, Duration, and History”) and Boym’s absolutely wonderful The Future of Nostalgia (which is more about nationalism, but still a great book).  There are probably more, but these are the two I (re)read while writing this.

Filed under: album cover art  indie  Jandek  No Caption Needed  Pitchfork  vintage photography  William Eggleston