When Did Album Covers Become Art?

In the days of 78 rpm records, discs were commonly sold in plain paper sleeves, a bit like brown paper bags. The illustrated cover is generally credited to Alex Steinweiss of Columbia Records, who introduced it in 1939.

When the LP arrived in 1948, it came with a big canvas: about twelve inches square. From there, the cover shifted from a container into a place for expression. Reid Miles’s typography for Blue Note. Pink Floyd working with Hipgnosis. The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967), with its cover by Peter Blake and Jann Haworth. Before you heard a note, the cover was already speaking to you.

When the CD arrived in 1982, each side shrank to about 12 centimeters, roughly one-sixth the area of an LP. And today, many people meet a cover as a thumbnail a few centimeters wide on a phone screen.

Sleeve Off shows covers as large as the screen allows. It comes from wanting to present them as art, and it’s also a small act of resistance against today’s thumbnail culture.

Regardless of an artist’s fame or an album’s commercial success, I believe there’s an appeal you can feel even in a photo of nothing more than a stranger.