Street photography as cover art

I've always been a bit of a reader and have always liked owning and collecting books. Not just photography books. All my life I have been a fan of novels and whilst some people consider time spent reading fiction, time wasted, I do not and have found much to inspire me in literature.
Indeed, some authors and their books have resulted in projects
and pictures I have created that might not have come into being if I hadn't been inspired by the written word and the worlds conjured up by them.

I have talked before about this. When reading a novel, story or poem we are forced to use our mind's eye to create the physical space we are being told about and colour it accordingly. Part of the enjoyment of reading is that we are all different and so we will all imagine a described scene and its contents in our own personal way.

For me the novels of the likes of J G Ballard, Philip K Dick and Vladimir Nabokov are first off the shelf when looking for a creative hit from literature. Sometimes just the act of holding the book and examining the cover, flicking through it and thinking about its content is enough to get the creative juices flowing. Having the physical thing is like having a tactile creative resource that can engage the imagination.

Of course, part of the pleasure of owning books is that they are always there. Displayed in the home, they are a constant reminder of other worlds that exist beyond the everyday. Each book just waiting to be opened to the inquiring mind.

Reading a book is sometimes something you look forward to so much that you can barely bring yourself to do it. For me, the pleasure of owning books is not just the joy of reading them and the creative ideas that I gain from them but also the beauty of them as physical objects, their covers, design and typography etc. I get quite a buzz from being in bookshops and browsing the covers and the various editions that they come in. If I want to buy an older book, whether a classic or something that has been in publication for some time and I don't like the cover, I will hunt for another edition, perhaps from ten, twenty or more years go.

To this extent, I will judge a book by its cover. I was recently sorting through my literary library after putting some new shelves up and noticed how many books had covers illustrated by photographs. I have obviously inclined towards them over the years due to my interest and occupation. But I noticed there were a number of volumes whose covers had been decorated with pictures taken by some of the great street photographers of our times. There were photos that were immediately recognisable and those which I needed to check the back cover credit for. 

Now obviously, using photographs on front covers is nothing new and there are thousands of examples of moody images on all kinds of books across many genres. Crime, thrillers and mystery novels being the most common examples. I have even been fortunate to have my own images used in such a way and it can be quite a good little earner when a publisher comes after one of your images to use on hopefully the next blockbuster.

So, this discovery of famous images from the past being used on covers made me want to look more closely at what has been chosen and how they have been used. When designing a cover for a novel and using an exisitng image because of the books format, and because of the typography used with the title, the image will sometimes need to be cropped to fit, especially if the image is to fill the entire cover.

I became intrigued in this and was interested to see how designers went about it. After all, when we are composing our pictures in camera at the time of shooting and perhaps when cropping in photoshop afterwards, it's a very important decision. Knowing what to keep and what to leave out and can make or break the final image.

To experience the rest of the article, check out my video on youtube