It makes no doubt, you’ve already seen all of them, these particular album covers for Pink Floyd, MUSE, Led Zepellin, The Mars Volta or Biffy Clyro. And without doubt, you’ve already seen many other creations by Storm Thorgerson. But who was hiding behind these original creations? Little presentation.
Storm Thorgerson was a British photographer and graphic artist and created from 1968 to his death. A childhood friend to different Pink Floyd members, he studied at Leicester, finishing his art diploma with the best grades, before going to the Royal College of Art to study cinema and pass a MA.
With strong skills to help him, he created the famous collective Hipgnosis in 1968 with Aubrey Powell, and together they started to design these famous album covers that everybody knows, whether it was for his childhood friends or for Led Zeppelin, Genesis, UFO or Yes, to only give a few. However, the group stopped to work together in 1983, but Storm kept creating album covers each one more original than the other.
Thorgerson’s style is full of surrealism. He diverts objects, pushing them away from their original contexts, often in extremely vast environments, creating an appearance of a dream-like world, driving to a particular sensation but often putting in the front the new beauty of these objects. He used photography, which generally represents reality, to create these unreal shots, contrasting with our knowledge and questioning what is real or not in the image.
His work was highly prolific until his death in 2013, and he produced designs for bands which marked minds by their originality and surrealism. His importance and impact, in the world of album covers, has reached the point that an award for best creation and design for an album has his name. I invite you to go on his studio website that despite his passing away, kept creating new designs, in the same spirit he had.
