Judge a Photographer By His Book Covers

if not killing animals then at least looking the part. Cordner’s image of Bristol Palin’s former fiancé wearing a camouflage jacket and peering out from behind pine trees was later used on the cover of Johnston’s book Deer in the Headlights: My Life in Sarah Palin’s Crosshairs. It was the fifteenth book cover that Cordner had been commissioned to shoot.

Although book covers are little different to any other photography commission, the special use to which the images are put does give them an extra appeal. A book cover won’t just sell a product in the way that the result of an advertising shoot will do. It will appear in stores across the country, on bookshelves around the world and it will help to summarize a cultural product. We might be told not to judge books by their covers but we do anyway, and we certainly buy them and recognize them by their covers. A photographer whose image appears on the cover of a bestselling book can know that his image has been printed thousands, if not millions, of times, has helped to create success

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