6 album covers in our archive
Behind the Covers currently documents 6 Taylor Swift album covers from 2006 to 2022. Read together, the entries show how the artwork changed from release to release, with each story identifying the designers, photographers, source material, and design decisions behind the sleeve.
Cover evolution
Beth Garrabrant photographed Taylor Swift looking toward the flame of a lighter for the standard Moonstone Blue Midnights cover. The close-up sits inside an off-white, retro record-jacket layout with the track list printed on the front and the Midnights title set in blue-gradient type. The standard front is one part of a four-jacket campaign, not a generic set of blue-purple gradient portraits.
In July 2020, with the world shut down, Taylor Swift vanished into a friend's woods with one photographer, no crew, and nightgowns ordered online. The black-and-white image she came back with shows her almost lost among the trees, a tiny pioneer figure swallowed by fog. The cover for folklore is a story about scale, solitude, and making art with whatever you have.
The pink glitter word floating in a bruise of clouds says everything before you notice the girl beneath it. Taylor Swift handed her seventh album's entire visual world to a 24-year-old photographer two years out of art school. Here's how a sky, a blue-dipped strand of hair, and a change of record labels came together.
A striking black-and-white portrait shows Swift with newspaper-style text covering half her face, embodying her transformation from country sweetheart to defiant pop star after public controversies.
A Polaroid-style portrait crops Swift's face below her eyes, creating mystery about the album's emotional content. The photography duo Lowfield shot over 400 Polaroid photographs for the project.
A curly-haired young woman stares out from a swirling green backdrop, her name looped in white script across the bottom. The photographer who shot it had a hunch: this thing is going to go places. He had no idea how far.
