What do Richard Avedon Alfred Eisenstaed, George Silk and Ansel Adams have in common? They all shot cringe worthy covers for Life Magazine. Never underestimate the ability of great photographers to produce some real stinkers. The key is not letting anyone see them…
See more here: Life’s 20 Worst Covers
7 Comments
Haha APE. That’s so true. We exhibit what we feel like we should exhibit and nothing more.
Figures I would like the Avedon cover shown. LOL
Agreed, definitely not his best work, but I really enjoyed the shapes.
I saw an Adams exhibit here a couple of years ago. They included some of his portrait work and it was terrible. Very forced and schmaltzy. I guess it paid the bills at that time of his life though.
Reading about Avedon I remember he was in some kind of conflict with some magazine editors, later he decided to resign and started urban fashion photography or something like that, I mean to follow his dreams.
Or maybe the aesthetics of that time was the right approach.
[…] Even the best have produced the worst. […]
Ouch. Okay, the Kaye Ballard cover is excellent. Great composition, exposure, tonality. I can’t see how this made the list, it’s actually a very good photograph.
The lady with the lute however, is an example of bad photography right out of a textbook; bad composition and horribly off-center framing, lousy lighting and miserable exposure complete with blown-out highlights AND way too much black. And, just for bad measure, a large, distracting object placed in the foreground directly over the right hand of the subject. The art director must have just had his eyes dilated earlier that day….
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