As an amateur photographer and a soon-to-be-published collaborator on a photobook, I have an interest in photos used on book covers. Professor Karl Baden of Boston College has assembled a collection fed by his interest in how photography is used by publishers, particularly for book covers. His online, searchable archive, Covering Photography is impressive.
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. Curious about this metaphorical relationship between cover and content, I began to assemble a collection that currently numbers more than 1,200 volumes, includes over 300 photographers, and spans the history of the medium, from Niépce, Daguerre and Fox Talbot through Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman, Carrie Mae Weems and other established contemporary practitioners.
