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The Album Cover Photography of Michael Wilson

The Album Cover Photography of Michael Wilson

Good album covers make you want to hear the record, creating curiosity and building expectations. They help set the tone, whet your appetite, fire your imagination, and—when you finally listen to the music—enhance the listening experience.

And they don’t just happen. As musicians call on, say, Brian Eno, Daniel Lanois, or Joe Henry in search of the perfect sound, they often seek out an appropriate artist or photographer to create a certain look. Album covers may, with time, seem intrinsically connected with the music, but they can also achieve their own autonomy. By the 1970s books like the popular and trend-setting Album Cover Album were already popular. People often frame covers, and the term “art cover” has been coined for works by Andy Warhol, Ben Shahn, Raymond Pettibon, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and others. Some artists and photographers have developed such a distinct style of album art that they have ended up becoming their own kind of auteur.

Michael Wilson (www.michaelwilson.pictures) belongs in that category. Since his pictures started appearing on album covers in the late 1980s, Wilson has combined his passion for the history of photography with his own personal vision, and in the process he has amassed a huge body of work. To date his pictures have shown up on over 300 front covers; booklets, other inserts, and back covers push his album art total over 500. (Besides his work for the music industry, Wilson has also published four books, shot for magazines, and exhibited in galleries and museums.) His projects have sent him to Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Belgium, France, England, the Netherlands, China, India, and all over the United States. You’d have a hard time finding a popular genre that hasn’t benefited from a Michael Wilson album cover—folk, jazz, Americana, indie rock, blues, classical, and bluegrass form a partial list–and the labels he’s worked with include Nonesuch, Lost Highway, New West, Blue Note, Verve, Concord, Hightone, and Warner Bros. Bill Frisell, Over the Rhine, Buddy Miller, John Hiatt, and Lyle Lovett are among the artists who have repeatedly requested his services.

Wilson is quick to acknowledge the influence of historically significant photographers—including August Sander, Bruce Davidson, Bill Brandt, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Robert Adams, and Andre Kertesz—and this begins to explain why many of his pictures evoke an earlier time. The majority of his album covers are black and white; he still shoots film, processing and printing his own black-and-white work. Sometimes the pictures are shot out in the country, where the sky is likely to be overcast and gray. The trees tend to be leafless and the ground dry. You see old buildings that show the signs of age. Inside them, you see large rooms with tall ceilings; the rooms are empty, or nearly so, and the walls are usually bare; if there’s any furniture at all, it’s the skeleton of a chair. In rooms with tall, narrow windows, sunshine sometimes registers as a single block of light, obscuring the outside world. There’s an air of mystery to his pictures but at the same time there’s something inviting about them.

You almost never see crowds of people in his photographs, although you do see places that once drew a crowd, like old churches or abandoned storefronts. A business district may be decaying, but there is a poetry to that street that you’d miss if you drove past it in a hurry. Wilson’s images encourage you to slow down and notice things you might otherwise overlook. What you might consider drab turns out to be striking, yet nothing is romanticized or dramatized.

The Album Cover Photography of Michael Wilson

His musician portraits aren’t glamour shots with rock star smiles and flashy outfits. These photographs seem frank and unfiltered, the subjects staring back at the camera as directly as it looks at them. Wilson’s subjects seldom smile, and their faces sometimes project fragility and sensitivity, but they don’t emit a tortured-artist vibe.

Wilson and I are both Cincinnati residents, and recently I visited him at his home, which, although it’s in a city neighborhood, has a rural feel. Located at the end of a dead-end street, the house is on two acres, with a garden, two goats, and nine chickens. His basement functions as both a darkroom and an office in which everything from negatives to finished album covers is stacked and shelved and filed. While showing me various samples of his work, Wilson revealed how the media had changed since his photographs began appearing on album covers. At first his pictures solely adorned compact discs, which—remember these?—were housed in long boxes (“Those drove art departments crazy”); interestingly, 12-inch LP-size images exist for his CD-only covers, as record companies produced flats for advertising purposes.

In a curious twist of fate, Michael Wilson has been active long enough to see the media reverse course. While CD-only was standard at the start of his career, almost all his projects now include a vinyl release; in fact, some early albums have been reissued as first-time-ever 12-inch LPs, including some Buddy Miller titles and the classic cover for the final Replacements studio album, All Shook Down. I visited on a day when Wilson was waiting to learn what photos Nonesuch had chosen for Brad Mehldau’s 8-LP release, 10 Years Solo Live, which will contain a 20-page booklet with photographs and an extended essay by Mehldau. In person Wilson is soft spoken, down to earth, focused, and lucid. It turns out we were born a year apart, and during the conversation there was no need to explain pop culture reference points—especially when it came to music.

That isn’t to say, though, that Wilson was part of the musical mainstream while attending high school in the 1970s.

 

“When I should have been listening to the usual suspects—Aerosmith, Zeppelin—I couldn’t care less,” he confessed. “All through high school I had four Dennis Brain French horn records that I would listen to over and over. My love of the French horn led to photography, in that I’d saved up 800 dollars to buy a horn.” At the last minutes he changed his mind, though. “That was about the exact same time that I had the realization that I was a little delusional,” he said. “Although I loved this instrument, I was about the worst horn player in the high school. I just honestly couldn’t play it.”

Rather than buy a French horn, he loaned his brother money for a Martin guitar and got himself a Pentax 35mm camera. When offered a college scholarship, Wilson learned, after talking to a counselor, that he could major in photography. Quickly what began as a course of study transformed into a calling. “It was like walking into a darkened theater where someone gave you a ticket to a movie or a play,” Wilson explained. “You only went to it because they gave it to you for free. The curtain goes back. You realize, I love this. I certainly didn’t seek it out, but once it was shown to me I was a goner.”

Wilson happened to connect with pop music during a period when it was experiencing a burst of creativity. “I got all ate up with the Buzzcocks, Elvis Costello, the Talking Heads,” he said. “I was more typical for someone my age.” During this period Wilson looked at photography books in libraries and album covers wherever he could find them. “I would spend lots of time hanging out at record stores,” he said. “I’d see a Robert Frank photograph on a New Lost City Ramblers record. I’d see a Stephen Shore photograph on an ECM cover. ECM covers were always so beautiful. In two hours in a record store I’d see five or six that were just as appealing as anything I saw in the photo books at the library, and I would be just as moved by these photographs.”

After college, the jobs Wilson landed in the photography business threatened to dull his passion. A friend who knew what Wilson really wanted to do suggested he send pictures to some record companies. “Among the other music nerd things, when I was looking at album covers I would pay attention to the art director,” Wilson explained. “There was a woman’s name that showed up on a lot of the album covers that jumped out at me. My friend was like, ‘Does she even know you want to do this?’


“About 1989 I printed a handful of portraits. My wife Marilyn bound them together in a book I sent to this person. All I knew was her name, Jeri Heiden, and that she worked at Warner Brothers. It turned out she was the head of the art department. She was one of those rare people who didn’t need a salesman. She saw something in the work. I now realize what a rare gift that is. There’s such a minority of people that can recognize something and say no, I trust you, do it. I got a postcard back from her. A couple weeks after that management from the BoDeans called on Jeri’s recommendation and asked me to shoot the band as they were touring near Cincinnati.”


The Album Cover Photography of Michael Wilson

Getting your foot in the door isn’t the same as making it, and when Wilson met with Jeri Heiden in her L.A. office, he nearly thwarted a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. “I had a really horrible portfolio that was like everything I had done for two years as freelancer, neatly laminated, all meant to impress her with how professional I was,” he said. “It was embarrassing. She was looking at the same photographs I was for inspiration—you know, the history of photography—but I was showing her this stuff that was at best mediocre commercial photography. As we’re leaving her office I’m feeling miserable.

“Fortunately, though, Jeri Heiden threw out a lifeline to me. She said, ‘Did you bring anything else you could show me?’ I said ‘Well, it’s just my own stuff’—pictures I was going to show a friend that lived in L.A.—and among those was the two dogs in the street that became the Replacements cover and some other pictures. She immediately pulled those out and called in another art director who was designing the package, Kim Champagne, and she asked Kim who was shooting the Replacements. They had booked another photographer in L.A., a really great photographer, and Jeri Heiden said, ‘Why don’t you send Michael to Minneapolis?’ That was huge.”

Asked why his work clicked with Jeri Heiden and other art directors, Wilson pointed to the history and tradition of photography. “My inspirations are pretty apparent in my work,” he said. “The portraiture of August Sander and Irving Penn…I love the editorial approach and the insight of people like Robert Frank, and that carries.”

Emerging during the “CD-only era” offered Wilson some advantages, as CD inserts often include a series of photos that interact with each other. Wilson’s portraits, nature shots, building shots, street shots, and other imagery that end up on the covers and inserts usually belong to a single session, forming what could be interpreted as a narrative with the musician or band as the main character. Often likening the portrait process to a conversation, Wilson linked the subject and the surrounding scenery when he said, “I love looking around the edges of the conversation.” Like a jazz musician, Wilson relies heavily on improvisation. “Let’s say I’m meeting somebody at their home in Nashville,” he explained. “I get the address, and maybe I go and I find out where it is and then spend an hour where I park the car and walk through a neighborhood—is there anything here I see? It’s very much a scavenger thing. And then you get these gifts thrown at you sometimes—you show up somewhere, and there’s this beautiful place that makes itself available to you.”

 

Getting a good portrait is a combination of guts, sensitivity, and ceaseless experimentation, and Wilson is well aware the odds are stacked against success. “It’s an unnatural moment,” Wilson explained. “It’s way more likely to fail than to work. The way I work, I have to be given something by the subject, their trust—there has to be something. The first job is to understand the light and all the nuts and bolts of picture making, but then it becomes a matter of managing the human aspect, the conversational aspect of it.

“I might see glimpses—you see the way their weight shifts, and very often the stuff that is most interesting is what happens when they think they’re off the hook, when I’m loading film or something like that, and then I come back. It’s like two people passing each other, and no matter what they do they get in each other’s way, and then eventually you meet in some kind of place where there’s some actual good flow happening—and then hopefully at that point the light’s working for you.”

Typically Wilson spends three to six hours with a musician. “Some of that is me looking for places,” he explained. “We’re driving somewhere or walking or talking, but it will wind up being maybe several hundred photographs. I use several different cameras, so I shoot anywhere from 100 to 200 frames. Maybe that’s six to ten rolls of black-and-white film and an easily equal number of color, which would be shot digitally, so you’re talking about 400 or 500 pictures from out of which 10 or 12, hopefully, will really resonate.”

Wilson’s fondness for film cameras extends beyond nostalgia or technical preferences. It also affects the portrait process, I learned after asking if, while snapping photos, he has Eureka! moments where he knows he just snapped the perfect shot. “No, and I usually don’t trust that,” he replied. “I try not to think about it. And that’s one of the problems that I have with digital photography—there’s such a temptation to judge your work as you’re taking it. Basically I’m staying in the moment of the conversation. I’ve seen people make the digital image work in their favor, but I try not to be swayed by how I’m feeling at the moment.”

So what does he look for when he sifts through contact sheets in search of a successful portrait? “I equate it with, you’re trying to get across a stream and you’re judging the rocks, which one will hold up your weight, and I think a good portrait is like that,” he explained. “You look at it from a distance and you say, ‘Yeah, I’ll put my weight on that.’ That’s how I feel about a picture that’s a success. It will hold the weight of the viewer’s trust, and hopefully it’s flattering—I definitely want the subject to like the picture. There are some really beautiful portraits in the history of photography that are about confrontation and discomfort and many more that are about drama and glamour. I think that my portraits probably land somewhere between those two poles. It is what I can do honestly.”

Wilson didn’t mention this, but I also suspect his easygoing and down-to-earth demeanor works in his favor by helping his subjects feel at ease. What also helps is his favorite camera, a Rolleiflex. “It’s a square format, and it’s a twin lens, so you hold it at your waist and look down,” he said. “When I first discovered portraiture I always had a lot of difficulty looking people in the eye. When I’m using this camera, when I take your picture I’m staring at my feet while you’re looking at the camera.”

Technology and the music industry have both changed radically since Wilson began, but his role is still the same. “From where I sit it doesn’t feel that different,” he said. “I’m still standing at my sink and developing film. I’m standing here at this table cutting the negatives, making the contact sheets, and I’m sitting somewhere in the house with a magnifying glass and studying those pictures. I’m still looking for the picture in these ten contact sheets and throwing stuff in the pot and reducing it down. That part really hasn’t changed.”

All of us have viewed album covers where the artwork seems to match the music so well that it’s hard to imagine one without the other, and I asked Wilson to reflect on that special interaction between a good album cover and the music on a record.  “The photograph can almost carve out a mental space where you think of that music,” Wilson said, “and I know for my own sake there are those occasions where I’ve been able to work on a project that I honestly think is a really beautiful record and to feel like the picture is not hindering and maybe even adding to the experience. It doesn’t get better than that.”

After Wilson discussed his first experiences in the music industry, I decided to track down the art director whose support helped launch his career. Now the creative director for Smog Design Incorporated (smogdesign.com), Jeri Heiden clearly described the impression Wilson’s photography left on her when, decades ago, she became aware of his work. Her response affirmed that, even in the earliest stage of his career, there was something special about Michael Wilson’s photography.

“What struck me most about Michael’s work was his humanistic and compassionate eye,” she wrote in an email. “His work reminded me of some of history’s greatest portrait and documentary photographers, such as Walker Evans, Robert Frank, August Sander, Eudora Welty, and Dorothea Lange. He has a tremendous ability to see light and work with what is natural and present. His pictures tell great stories and reveal great characters and emotion. Michael’s work stood out strongly against all of the glitz, glamor, and processes that were so prevalent in the 1980s.”

Tags: WILSON AUDIO

Jeff Wilson

By Jeff Wilson

This will take some explaining, but I can connect the dots between pawing through LPs at a headshop called Elysian Fields in Des Moines, Iowa, as a seventh grader, and becoming the Music Editor for The Absolute Sound. At that starting point—around 1970/71—Elysian Fields had more LPs than any other store in Des Moines. Staring at all the colorful covers was both tantalizing and frustrating. I had no idea who most of the artists were, because radio played only a fraction of what was current. To figure out what was going on, I realized that I needed to build a record collection—and as anyone who’s visited me since high school can testify, I succeeded. Record collecting was still in my blood when, starting in the late 1980s, the Cincinnati Public Library book sale suddenly had an Elysian Fields quantity of LPs from people who’d switched to CDs. That’s where I met fellow record hawk Mark Lehman, who preceded me as music editor of TAS. Mark introduced me to Jonathan Valin, whose 1993 detective novel The Music Lovers depicts the battles between record hawks at library sales. That the private eye in the book, Harry Stoner, would stumble upon a corpse or two while unraveling the mystery behind the disappearance of some rare Living Stereo platters made perfect sense to me. After all, record collecting is serious business. Mark knew my journalistic experience included concert reviews for The Cincinnati Enquirer and several long, sprawling feature articles in the online version of Crawdaddy. When he became TAS music editor in 2008, he contacted me about writing for the magazine. I came on board shortly after the latest set of obituaries had been written for vinyl—and, as fate had it, right when the LP started to make yet another unexpected comeback. Suddenly, I found myself scrambling to document all the record companies pressing vinyl. Small outfits were popping up world-wide, and many were audiophile-oriented, plus already existing record companies began embracing the format again. Trying to keep track of everything made me feel, again, like that overwhelmed seventh grader in Elysian Fields, and as Music Editor I’ve found that keeping my finger on the pulse of the music world also requires considerable detective work. I’ve never had a favorite genre, but when it comes time to sit down and do some quality listening, for me nothing beats a well-recorded small-group jazz recording on vinyl. If a stereo can give me warmth and intimacy, tonal accuracy, clear imaging, crisp-sounding cymbals, and deep, woody-sounding bass, then I’m a happy camper.

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