Hipgnosis is the design studio responsible for a large share of the record sleeves that define British rock between 1970 and 1983, and it worked in a way that was unusual then and would be impossible now. It photographed rather than illustrated, it built and travelled to what it photographed rather than assembling it afterwards, and for much of its existence it did not quote a fee. Here is the studio, the method and the clients.

Denmark Street, 1970

Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey Powell had been working together since 1968, and in early 1970 they rented space and built a studio at 6 Denmark Street in London. The name came from graffiti on their flat door. Thorgerson liked the pun on hypnosis and the contradiction inside the word itself – hip meaning new and current, gnosis meaning ancient knowledge. Peter Christopherson joined as an assistant in 1974 and later became a full partner.

The method

The working principle was photographic. Where contemporaries reached for illustration or airbrush, Hipgnosis staged theatrical scenes at real locations with constructed props and photographed them, mostly on Hasselblad medium-format cameras, then manipulated the results in the darkroom – multiple exposures, mechanical cut-and-paste, airbrush work applied to photographs rather than instead of them.

The consequence is the thing people respond to without naming it. A photographed impossible object reads differently from a painted one: the eye accepts it as a record of something that happened, which is exactly why the images unsettle. It also meant the work was expensive and slow – a prop had to be built, a location found, a crew moved – at a time when a rival could have delivered a painting in a week. That cost is part of the story of why the studio could not survive the early 1980s.

The clients

Across the 1970s and early 1980s the studio designed for Pink Floyd, Led Zeppelin, Genesis, Black Sabbath, Yes, UFO, 10cc, Bad Company and many others. The Pink Floyd relationship is the longest and the most closely identified with the studio, and it produced the sleeve for The Dark Side of the Moon (1973), where the release credits sleeve design and photography to Hipgnosis and the sleeve art and sticker art to George Hardie. The production credits on that record are set out in who produced The Dark Side of the Moon.

That double credit is worth noticing, because it is how the studio usually worked: a photographic concept from Hipgnosis, with a separate illustrator brought in for the graphic element. Attributing a whole sleeve to one name is almost always a simplification of a release credit that lists two or three.

Pay what you think it is worth

The studio did not charge fixed fees. It asked artists to pay what they thought the work was worth. In an industry where design is normally the most aggressively costed line on a budget, that is an extraordinary arrangement, and it tells you something about the position the studio occupied at its peak – it only works if the client believes the sleeve matters as much as the record.

The end, 1983

The firm dissolved in 1983. The date is not an accident. The economics of album packaging were changing – the twelve-inch sleeve was about to be replaced as the standard format by something a quarter of the size – and a studio whose entire method depended on an expensive, large, photographic object was the least well placed of anyone to survive it. Thorgerson and Powell moved on to music video with Greenback Films, and Thorgerson later founded his own studio; his own account is in Storm Thorgerson.

Why the sleeves mattered so much then

It is worth reconstructing the commercial logic, because it has disappeared completely and without it the studio looks like an indulgence. In 1973 a record was bought in a shop by someone who could not hear it first. The sleeve was the only information available at the point of sale, it was thirty-one centimetres square, and it would then sit in the buyer’s room for years. A band investing heavily in that object was not being precious; it was buying the only advertising that reached the person actually making the decision.

Progressive rock had a second reason. These were records with no singles, long tracks and no obvious radio presence, sold largely on the strength of the album as an object. A sleeve that announced the record as serious and strange did work that a chorus would otherwise have done. That is why the most ambitious packaging of the era clusters around the least commercial music.

A note on what this piece does not do

There are no descriptions of the images here. This section writes about the designers, how they worked and which records they signed, not about what the pictures look like. That is deliberate, and it also happens to be the more useful half: the images are a search away, while an accurate account of who was credited with what on a given release generally is not.

Go deeper

The other artists in this section are Storm Thorgerson and Roger Dean, and the whole section is indexed in the artists behind prog’s album covers. For the band most associated with the studio, start with the best Pink Floyd albums and the argument about its two halves in the Waters era against the Gilmour era. The British scene these records belong to is the subject of Beyond the Thames, the second book in my Beyond the Sound series.

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