The Joshua Tree

The band fills the left third of a horizontal panel, four men in black pressed tightly together. Their gazes scatter, one straight out at you, the rest drifting toward the edges of the frame, so the group reads as alert and unsettled rather than composed for a portrait. The brimmed hat on one figure and the differing lines of sight break any symmetry, keeping the cluster human and slightly guarded. The eye lands on them first because of that density of dark forms against the emptiness beside them.

Then the picture releases you. Behind the band the land opens into a vast, eroded basin of pale hills, with a thin dark gully snaking toward distant mountains. This is where the composition does its work: the tight human mass on the left and the enormous, receding void on the right create a pull, the eye dragged from the faces out across the desert. The band anchors you; the landscape abandons you.

The image is black and white throughout, built from silver greys and deep shadow, a tonal range that flattens the men into near-silhouette while letting the distant hills glow with soft light. That contrast reads the figures as cold and closed and the land as luminous and indifferent, so the emotional temperature of the picture is set entirely by tone rather than colour.

The photograph sits framed in a thin gold line against a pure black field, like a window cut into the night. The surrounding blackness isolates the scene, turning it into an object to be looked into rather than a scene you stand inside. The gold hairline gives it the formality of a framed print.

The crop is the other decisive choice. The letterbox shape mimics a cinema screen, and that widescreen ambition is the point: it invites you to read the still image as a frame from a film, the four men caught mid-story in a landscape too big for them. The composition delivers the album's stated idea, desert meeting civilization, resolution in the face of desolation, without a single word. The men embody the civilization; the eroded basin embodies the desolation; the space between them, the gully running to the mountains, is the unresolved distance the whole picture holds open.

The sleeve was the work of Dutch photographer Anton Corbijn, who travelled across the California desert with U2 over several days chasing a single brief: desert meeting civilization, resolution in the face of desolation. The concept came first, under the working titles The Two Americas and The Desert Songs, an attempt to hold the band's love-hate relationship with America inside a frame of sand and ghost towns.

The album's name arrived on the journey almost by accident. On the evening after the first day's shoot, Corbijn told the band about Joshua trees, the spiked plants of the Mojave, and suggested they include one. The next day Bono declared it: the album would be The Joshua Tree, its Biblical weight sealing the choice. On the second day Corbijn spotted a single tree standing alone off Route 190 near Darwin, a rarity since the trees usually grow in clusters, and the crew photographed it for roughly twenty minutes before moving on. Those images became the inner shots. Corbijn worked with a Russian-made Horizont panoramic camera, his first time using it. The front-cover group shot itself was made not inside Joshua Tree National Park, as many assume, but at Zabriskie Point in Death Valley, over two hundred miles from the lone tree.

Steve Averill, the Dublin-born designer who has shaped every U2 cover from Boy to Songs of Innocence, art-directed and built the sleeve around the landscape. He described the theme as desert and ghost towns, places where nature and civilization collide, and traced its cinematic eye to directors like John Ford and Sergio Leone. Averill also mocked up prototype covers, including a landscape-only design without the band in the manner of an ECM jazz record, before the group settled on the cinematic shot.

Released on 9 March 1987 by Island Records, the album marked U2's turn toward American and Irish roots, blues, gospel, soul and folk, away from their earlier ambient post-punk. It was the first U2 album issued simultaneously on twelve-inch vinyl, five-inch CD and cassette, each format carrying a slightly different version of the cover image.

The afterlife of the image became its own strange chapter. The lone tree from the shoot fell and died around the year 2000 and is no longer standing, yet fans still trek to the remote spot in the Mojave, which has become a shrine marked by a bronze plaque reading 'Have you found what you're looking for?', a nod to the song 'I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For.' Stone circles mark where each band member stood. The Death Valley and Zabriskie Point setting still draws pilgrims to the edge of Death Valley National Park decades on.

The parodists came quickly. In August 1987 cartoonist Berkeley Breathed mocked the sleeve on the back of his book Billy and the Boingers Bootleg. A tribute band called the Title Trackers, formed by David Tokaji, Wiener and Andy Hill, later wrote and recorded '(Chopping Down) The Joshua Tree' as a loving parody.

Critical standing followed. In 1991 Rolling Stone ranked The Joshua Tree at number 97 on its list of the 100 Greatest Album Covers of All Time, and the album was selected for preservation in the US National Recording Registry, cementing its cultural significance decades after release. When Corbijn and Averill discussed the cover in a 2021 Amateur Photographer feature, the magazine described the sleeve as remaining as fresh as when it was made. The image is still regarded as one of U2's most recognisable, four cold men and one window of grey desert continuing to send strangers into the sand.