Not all album covers are created equal. Some are so incredible that they can’t now be explained by the people who originally conceived of them.

Here we look at 30 of the worst, most strange and downright ridiculous album covers ever made. Let’s kick off with the inimitable charms of Quim Barreiros…

Did what I think may be my last easter egg hunt with my kids this Sunday… They have grown to the point where they are only doing it for mom and dad so I thought I would share these photos of them. Oh I miss their childish behavior.

The conventional wisdom that unique works of art are more attractive to the market than multiples was turned on its head by a white-glove sale of works by the photographer William Eggle ston at Christie’s, New York, on 12 March, which was 100% sold by lot and by value.

The 36-lot sale, “Photo graphic Masterpieces by William Eggleston”, totalled $5.9m, well over its pre-sale estimate of $2.2m to $3.4m, with the top lot, Untitled, 1970, making a world auction record for a single print by the artist at $578,500 (est $200,000-$300,000).

The sale was controversial because it included new, larger-format editions of the famous dye-transfer images that the artist first produced in the 1970s and early 1980s. The pieces that attracted the largest sums were new prints of works that were made famous by their inclusion in a 1976 solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Before the auction there were rumours in the trade of a possible lawsuit by a disgruntled owner of one of the originals. There was a separate debate in the trade about the rights and wrongs of the sale. “This whole thing seemed so strange to me… it’s like Diane Arbus (if she were alive) deciding now to reprint her most famous images the size of Gurskys or Demands,” said the art adviser Todd Levin of the Levin Art Group.

In light of the sale’s success, it would be difficult to bring any kind of lawsuit, however. “What would be the argument for damages? It would be hard to show that the sale had diminished the market,” says the art lawyer Donn Zaretsky, of John Silberman Associates.

According to the New York state law on photography editions, sellers must be clear about edition size. Nonetheless, they need only state the number of multiples that are already in existence. While it is standard practice for sellers to be open about the edition size, the number of artist’s proofs is less commonly disclosed. Sellers must state whether the number of proofs that have already been made “exceeds the number in the limited edition by 20 or 20%, whichever is greater”. This means that works that might be made in the future are not covered.

This leaves “serious grey areas”, says Francis Hodgson, the photography critic of the Finan cial Times and the former head of Sotheby’s photography department. He adds: “The real meat is in trading practices and whether one thinks it is right and proper to standardise them.”

“Up until the early 20th century, the idea of a limited edition in the graphic arts did not exist. Previously, it had been a factor of the mechanics of the process—for example, a lithographic stone can only issue about 1,000 examples,” says Weston Naef, the curator emeritus of photography at the J. Paul Getty Museum.

He insists that artists must be allowed to create works as they see fit—“it’s their job”—and adds that the image and the object are distinct entities. “This is especially important for Eggle ston because he is mostly known for his images, which have been seen in reproduction more than in their original form.” The new works were created using different processes and are on a much larger scale than the originals.

Christie’s points out that there is a long precedent of artists reprinting works in new formats. “Editions are about the format and the process, so to say that we are somehow reprinting identical objects is absurd,” says Josh Holdeman, the senior vice president and international director of 20th-century art at Christie’s.

The ultimate test is whether the market accepts a work, says Zaretsky, adding that the trade “does a pretty good job of policing itself”. Owners of the originals need not worry too much, says the art adviser Allan Schwartzman: “If I owned originals, I would fear them being reproduced. But if they are reprinted, it is usually because there is an increased interest. As the market expands, value often does, too.”

Nonetheless, the practice of limited editioning was, says Hodgson, originally a “defence manoeuvre by the trade. And it’s very odd when people break their own defences.” The secondary market dealer Christophe Van de Weghe says: “The photography market can be annoying. Editions are complicated, and can be confusing—it’s why I decided to step back from dealing in it.”

UPDATE: A New York collector filed a lawsuit against William Eggle ston and his trust in federal court this week over the recent auction of digital reprints. Jonathan Sobel, a financier, says his collection of more than 190 photographs by Eggle ston which includes limited editions prints, has been devalued by the auction. He is seeking damages from Eggle ston and his son William Eggle ston III, as trustees of the Eggle ston Artistic Trust, for violation of the New York Arts and Cultural Affairs Law, fraudulent misrepresentation, negligent misrepresentation, unjust enrichment and promissory estoppel.

By Charlotte Burns.

Lewis Hine’s photography was both craft and calling. Trained as a teacher and social worker, Hine (1874-1940) picked up a camera in 1904 so that he could offer photography classes at his school. Soon he was advertising his services in the field of ‘Social Photography,’ with a specialty in ‘graphic representations of conditions and methods of work.’ Commissions from the National Child Labor Committee produced some of his most haunting images…  Hine’s belief in the essential nobility of labor is what distinguishes him from other photographers in the medium. He dubbed his works ‘Hineographs,’ proud of their rhetorical power and graphic distinction, which he developed more self-consciously in later photographs, such as those in  the eponymous book ‘Men at Work’ (1932) which celebrates riveters and girder-wranglers, including the men (like the one above) who toiled atop the Empire State Building.

These auditions for “The Worst Kung Fu Movie Ever” is unbelievably funny… thought I would post this just to lighten things up a bit…

Really !  It only takes is a little shoe polish, hairspray, vaseline and a little light? I guess Fox is pandering to middle Americans who see Kraft food commercials and wonder how it is all done. A humorous read for all serious photogs, editors and stylists
http://www.foxnews.com/leisure/2012/03/20/hairspray-and-vaseline-secrets-food-photography/?intcmp=features

At a Christie’s auction yesterday that was intended to expand the appeal of William Eggleston’s work to a much broader range of contemporary art collectors, 36 recent prints by the photographer brought in a total of $5,903,250.

It was the first time Eggleston created digital pigment prints, a departure from the dye-transfer process he has used since the 1970s, which offered Eggleston a deep color saturation that became a defining characteristic of his work.

The high lot in the sale, a print of Eggleston’s classic “Untitled, 1970,” which depicts a child’s tricycle from a glorifying ground-level angle, brought in $578,500, more than doubling the previous auction record for the artist of $275,000. Several other prints sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars. The auction, “Photographic Masterworks by William Eggleston,” was a benefit for the Eggleston Artistic Trust.

According to Joshua Holdeman, international director of the Christie’s photography department, the point of the sale was to establish a new market for Eggleston’s photography in the contemporary art world. “Eggleston has been kind of stuck in the old school world of the photography collectors for a long time, whose primary concerns are about process, print type, print date, etcetera,” says Holdeman.

Whereas the type of print and the exact date a print was made is “a huge deal” for photography collectors, Holdeman says, “for contemporary art collectors it’s much more about the object itself—they couldn’t care if it’s a dye transfer or a pigment print or whatever, as long as the object itself is totally amazing, that’s what they care about.”

“This is an attempt to start a migration of Eggleston from the quote unquote confines of the photography world into the larger context of the art world,” Holdeman adds. By his account, the market-making auction was a stunning success. “I think it was probably the most important event for Eggleston in a long, long time,” he says.

A print of Eggleston’s photograph “Untitled, 1973,” which shows a corrugated metal roof sloping up to a store’s sign advertising Peaches and Coca-Cola, brought in the second highest price of the auction at $422,500. The high estimate for a smaller sized, vintage dye-transfer print of the same photograph that will be auctioned during the April 5 general photographs sale at Christie’s is $90,000. Many of the other Eggleston dye-transfers for sale in that auction have high estimates below $10,000.

The pigment prints in yesterday’s sale were from editions of two at a size of 44 x 60 inches. Eggleston had always wanted to print at a larger scale, Holdeman explains, but was confined by the size limitations of the dye-transfer process. “A huge amount of investigation and research was done into trying to figure out a way to print his images in this larger scale that would allow for the same kind of color saturation as well as clarity [that was achieved with the dye-transfer process].”

A dozen of the photographs sold yesterday had never before been published or offered for sale, which also added to the allure of the auction. “While there were certain iconic images that were from the Guide [William Eggleston’s Guide, the catalogue to the first-ever exhibition of color photographs at MoMA 1976] that everyone knew, there was a very conscious attempt not to make this a rehashing of the Guide in a new, larger size,” Holdeman notes.

The agreement between the Eggleston Artistic Trust and Christie’s also stipulated that the second print in the edition would not be sold for three years. “It was very much a conscious message that we wanted to send into the world,” Holdeman says, “that if you wanted to acquire one of these prints at anytime in the near future it’s going to be now.”

By Conor Risch