An old adage warns never judge a book by its cover. What about an album cover? Music critic Michael Jarrett observes, “[album] covers not only represent—encode in visual form—the myths associated with music, they contribute to the construction of those myths. They are part of the process that imbues music with meaning, giving it both a face and a voice.” (Sound Tracks) Record covers mirror back our perceptions of particular types of music, perceptions that are to a great extent visually and not musically determined, perceptions that are shaped by our past experiences with other texts representing aural “events.” Album covers are essential to our consumption of pop music; they shape our reception of the music the album contains.
Nancy & Lee’s cover photo was taken by Ron Joy (1931-2013), a prolific photographer whose celebrity photos appeared on the covers of magazines, books, and album covers from the 1960s through the 1990s. Joy had previously taken the cover photos for Nancy Sinatra’s albums Sugar (1966), Nancy in London (1966), Country, My Way (1967), and the Movin’ With Nancy soundtrack LP (1967). In contrast to the cover photographs of other records released during the same time period featuring couples, the minimalist, burnt orange background of Nancy & Lee is an interesting innovation. The cover of Sonny and Cher’s In Case You’re in Love (1967), for instance, features the laughing couple sitting back to back on a large boulder that sits above an expanse of water, likely a lake. Carryin’ On with Johnny Cash and June Carter (released later in 1967) features the smiling couple sitting together within a forest clearing, leaning against each other at the shoulder. Question: is the use of natural landscapes on these album covers intended to be an idealized visualization of an idyllic, untroubled, and pastoral life dating back to the Edenic world of Adam and Eve?
The Ron Joy photograph of Nancy and Lee eschews a natural setting in favor of the controlled lighting of a photography studio. The color of Nancy’s jacket and Lee’s shirt, as well as their sun-tanned faces, is enhanced by the minimalist burnt orange background. They are bent very slightly forward, Nancy leaning into him as if they are sitting atop a horse that’s not visible within the frame. The minimalist background accentuates their eyes as they both stare directly at the viewer, breaking the theatrical “fourth wall.” The tops of their heads are at the same level, as are their eyes. They imitate each other’s pose as well. Are they to be perceived as boy/girl fraternal twins (dizygotic), one light, one dark? We return their gaze, our eyes moving from to left to right and back again, caught by the surprising ambiguity of their facial expressions: is this photograph an artfully created spectacle, or a documentary-like portrait? Is the photograph pop music’s citation of the doubling scene of Liv Ullman and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman’s Persona (1966), released in the U.S. in 1967? Persona is a film that Susan Sontag said is about doubling: “...it is...pertinent to treat Persona as relating the duel between two mythical parts of a single self....” She goes on to say, “A sub-theme of doubling is the contrast between hiding and showing forth. The Latin word persona, from which the English ‘person’ derives, means the mask worn by an actor. To be a person, then, is to possess a mask.” (Styles of Radical Will).
