Are You Experienced
The Jimi Hendrix Experience · 1967
Karl Ferris pioneered the use of infrared film for album art, creating an otherworldly image where the band appears in unnatural purple, orange, and green hues through a fisheye lens — as if Hendrix had literally arrived from another dimension.
The UK version of the cover — the more celebrated of the two — features a photograph of Hendrix, bassist Noel Redding, and drummer Mitch Mitchell shot with a fisheye lens and infrared film. The result is a psychedelic, otherworldly image in which the band appears in unnatural purple, orange, and green hues. The fisheye lens distorts the proportions, making the image feel as if it's being viewed through a soap bubble or a hallucinatory vision.
Karl Ferris was a pioneering music photographer who was among the first to use infrared film for album art. Infrared film captures wavelengths of light invisible to the human eye, rendering foliage as white or bright pink, skin in unusual tones, and skies in deep, unnatural blues. Ferris used this technique to create an image that looked as revolutionary as the music sounded — as if Hendrix had literally arrived from another dimension.
The US version featured a different cover — a studio portrait of the band by Jim Marshall, with the three musicians looking directly at the camera. While this version is also well-known, it lacks the otherworldly quality of the UK infrared image.
Hendrix was a deeply visual artist. He often spoke about seeing music in colors and described his compositions in painterly terms. His live performances were among the most visually spectacular in rock history — the burning of his guitar at the 1967 Monterey Pop Festival became one of rock's most famous images. The psychedelic cover art matched this visual sensibility perfectly.
The album was released in May 1967 in the UK and August 1967 in the US, arriving just before the Summer of Love. Its revolutionary guitar techniques, studio experimentation, and psychedelic vision essentially redefined what rock music could be and what an electric guitar could sound like.
The UK cover image helped define the visual aesthetic of psychedelic rock — intense colors, distorted perspectives, and a sense of reality melting. Ferris's infrared technique was widely imitated throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s. The image remains one of the most recognizable in rock history and perfectly captures the moment when popular music entered a new phase of experimentation and ambition.