An excellent feature article by Erica Harvey currently up at Pitchfork discusses the state of photography in album artwork. It's definitely worth a read. We couldn't agree more with her opinion on vinyl as the preferred format for 20-somethings:
"One side-effect of the digital turn in music culture has been our relationship to the objects that populate it. We're more and more becoming nostalgic not for specific things from our youth, or even for our own memories, but for the surfaces and shapes of old-seeming objects, and for generalized types of memories. As a backlash to digital music's ephemerality and flux, we fixate longingly on the basicphysicality of records as much as we do with particular records we heard in our youth. iTunes and the iPod are wonderfully revolutionary pieces of technology, but they're also so effortlessly functional that they become mundane rituals of our everyday lives, blending into other activities. I'm a consummate re-tagger and artwork-adder, don't get me wrong. But compared to the rituals of flipping, cleaning, gazing upon, and showcasing my records that digital technology tries to recreate, it's not even a contest."
Below is Williams Eggleston's Greenwood, MS 1973, which is also the album cover for the Big Star classic Radio City.
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