Week three : The image as cultural change

Week three : The image as cultural change

Album covers have also been seen as art by many. especially when artists are hired by recording companies to create iconic album covers targeted at specific audiences (usually teenagers or young adults). This can be said for many things such as books covers or product packaging, since some people admit to buying a product, book or album solely because they liked the cover design.

An album cover that was seen by many as one of the most artistically influential of all time was the cover of The Beatles's 1967 album, Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. 

The cover for 'Sargent Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band', designed by photographer Peter Blake featuring the band themselves.

Peter Blake, a photographer and the designer behind the Sargent Pepper's album cover, decided that the theme for the image would be 'people we like'. Blake said that if they were in a park playing a concert then the people in the photo would just be anyone who turned up to the concert, but if they used cardboard cutouts, those people could be whoever they wanted. Along side celebrities and well known people, the Beatles also featured waxworks of themselves all dressed in matching suits; they referred to these as "the old Beatles". 

This colourful image would then go on to change the way album covers would look and be perceived, pushing the boundaries of the artistic creativity and ideas used to make and design an album cover.