Horses

The composition is almost shockingly simple: a figure against a wall, shot from waist level, the frame built on aligned verticals and diagonals so that a pose which looks informal is in fact carefully balanced. The thin black tie supplies a vertical accent that pulls the eye up from the collar to the chin, emphasizing the length of Smith's neck and the sharpness of her jaw. Mapplethorpe lined up her body so that the tip of a light triangle juts from her collarbone like an angel's wing, a small deliberate geometry hidden inside an apparently casual stance.

The palette is virtually monochromatic: the white of shirt and wall, the black of hair and tie, the warm grey of the shadows, the olive tone of the skin. The restriction focuses everything on form and expression, the two elements Mapplethorpe would prioritize throughout his career. The white shirt is crisp but not starched, its whiteness a field of light; the darker tone of the wall behind her head and the shadow under her jaw give just enough contrast to separate figure from ground and lend the image a sculptural quality.

The light comes from a single window source, soft and directional, throwing gentle shadows on one side of the face that give depth without melodrama. That even fall of light makes the whites glow, an overall brightness that reads as clarity or revelation. The photograph proves that visual power comes from what is excluded as much as from what is included.

The jacket over the shoulder is the single dramatic gesture, a reference to rat-pack cool that Smith reclaims for an androgynous purpose. That androgyny is the picture's real argument. Female artists on album covers were expected to be legible as glamorous, sexy, wholesome, or mystical; this image refuses all four. The men's shirt, the flat chest, the angular face, the direct gaze, the absence of makeup or jewelry, the shouldered jacket: every element combines into a portrait of gender as performance, of femininity as something that can be donned, discarded, or reinvented at will. Read as an early celebrity portrait, it captures Smith's unconventional and androgynous side while holding to a precise equilibrium of oppositions, white shirt against shadowed blazer, hard gaze against graceful pose.

The typography keeps its distance. Smith's name and the album title sit in a clean, modern font, set apart from the figure so the words behave as a caption rather than a competing design element. That deference lets the photograph dominate the sleeve with the authority of a gallery print. The monochrome and the plainness together give the image a quality unfixed to its moment, equally at home in 1975, 1955, or 1925. What it finally says is that a woman looking straight into the camera, with nothing to sell and nothing to prove, can be the most compelling image imaginable.

Mapplethorpe was Smith's close friend and long a collaborator, and in 1975 he was not yet the celebrated and controversial photographer he would become; he was still finding his way, shooting friends and lovers and moving toward the medium-format work that would make his name. He chose the location for its light: the penthouse of the art collector Sam Wagstaff in Greenwich Village, a large space with white walls whose windows overlooking One Fifth Avenue filled the neutral room with daylight. He worked using only that natural light.

Smith styled herself. The only thing she promised Mapplethorpe was to wear a clean shirt with no stains, which she found at a Salvation Army, a white button-down she paired with a black ribbon. She recalled that she "had no sense of how it would look, just that it should be true." For the shot she flung an old secondhand jacket over one shoulder and imagined she was the French actress Anna Karina being filmed by Godard.

The album was released on Arista Records in 1975, with the sleeve designed by Bob Heimall. The image nearly did not survive the label. Executives, worried that Smith with her lack of makeup and messy hair was not conventionally pretty enough to sell records, wanted to airbrush the photograph. Arista's Clive Davis was appalled by it and wanted to scrap it, objecting even to the faint hair on her upper lip. Smith, who had been given artistic control, refused to change the cover or to have the picture retouched, and the image was kept as shot.

On release the album made the Top 50 of the Billboard 200, and critics adored it. The cover has since been called the greatest rock portrait ever taken, and its influence on how female musicians present themselves runs deep: it opened a space for androgyny, intensity, and intellectual seriousness that Debbie Harry, Siouxsie Sioux, PJ Harvey, and countless others would occupy in their own ways.

Camille Paglia called the image "devastatingly original" and "the most electrifying image" of a woman of her generation, ranking it among a half-dozen supreme images of modern woman since the French Revolution and noting that no female rocker had ever dominated an image in such an aggressive, uncompromising way. It is now regarded as part of the visual culture of the twentieth century.

Its standing is confirmed by the institutions that collect it. The Museum of Modern Art holds the album cover, cataloged as a 1975 work crediting Mapplethorpe, Heimall, and Arista. A print of the cover image was jointly acquired by the J. Paul Getty Trust and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and a photograph from the same session is held by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate through ARTIST ROOMS, acquired via the d'Offay Donation in 2008.

The album and its image remain living things: R.E.M.'s Michael Stipe joined Smith on stage at a New York City show celebrating the album's fiftieth anniversary. Half a century on, the portrait still startles in its directness, its refusal to accommodate the viewer's expectations, its insistence that a woman looking straight at the camera is enough.