Apart
from the fact that these covers have a
definite sober feel to them, more important
is that both pictures are slightly elongated
and distorted. Interestingly, it was not
the original intention of the designers
of either band to show the pictures in
this way, as explained below:
The Joshua Tree was released just as the CD format
was being introduced in the world, and record companies
still had to press Vinyl as their main format, for
that reason Steve Averill (U2’s designer) designed
the cover with Vinyl measures in mind. Soon after,
he had to re-frame the same set of pictures and adapt
them to CD format dimensions producing the out-of-focus
version, which is the one used above because it is
the only one I knew existed when I went through the
cover comparisons for the first time.
On the other hand it was not Robert Freeman’s (photographer
for the Rubber Soul cover and many of other Beatles
albums) intention to make an elongated and distorted
picture, as this excerpt from his book “The Beatles:
a private view” describes: "When later we came to look
at the selection of slides, the white board onto which
they were being projected tilted, lightly distorting
the image. Paul immediately responded to this effect
and asked me if I could reproduce it for the cover.
So I found a way of matching the distortion by tilting
the image in a controlled fashion on the enlarger and copying
it onto a larger transparency”.
