Sam: There’s an ongoing fascination with 90s-era Projekt releases. For aficionados of those releases, here’s something really interesting! It’s a set of never-before-seen images from the photoshoot for one of Projekt’s iconic 90s albums! Back in 1993 Susan Jennings and I went out to the desert to shoot the cover photos for A Day in the Stark Corner. I recently asked Susan for her recollections.
The 90s jewel box edition | 
The tray card |
Susan: We rented a car and drove into the desert. Without GPS, without smartphones, without much more than a book of maps to flip through. Maybe back then in the 90’s, we had more faith in maps and our own instincts. That was just how we got places.
We were three: Sam and I were jointly the photographers/art directors, and my art school friend Petter was our model. A Norwegian exchange student with chiseled features, long honey-colored hair, and great creative input, he posed for us unselfconsciously.
Naked from the waist up, Petter posed in the dun-colored desert with flat mesas behind him. Sam and I clicked away frame after frame of film.
As we moved around looking for new angles and scenery, Petter stumbled across an old mattress, of which little remained besides the springs. These had been broken and warped by some previous visitors. Petter picked up a piece that vaguely resembled a halo of barbed wire, and began posing with it.
As he held it over his head, Sam and I shot the images that would become the album art for A Day in the Stark Corner.
Where is Petter now? Where was that desert, even? I don’t know the answer to either of those questions.
All I know is A Day in the Stark Corner is still powerful music, deserving of all of our efforts to create memorable imagery.
Sam: Neither of us remember who shot which of the photos. Who shot the cover? I think it probably was Susan, it might have been me? Susan gets the photo credit, we all created the images. I haven’t seen these images in 25 years! When I was redesigning the cover for the reissue of A Day in the Stark Corner, I asked Susan to digitize the 3 rolls of film we shot that day, 80 images in all. On this page you can see the progression of our ideas with 24 images in the order they were shot. All images are presented full frame (not cropped). I think it’s remarkable to peek into this moment in time in a way I didn’t think I would experience again. Enjoy!
Click on the photo for a new window with larger image.
 Sam: The cover is such an iconic image. The two on the right are the photos taken moments before the cover shot (directly above). The one we used was the last image on the roll of film. It’s worth noting that if we had taken one additional photo earlier the cover would never have been taken, because we would have stopped to rewind the film and the moment would have passed. That lens flare was really the sun, no photoshop tricks back then. This is the cover image full frame. You can see that I cropped the photo to hide the dust speck in the hair (*no photoshop to clean it up), as well as a bunch of the right side, to make it square like the jewel box booklet cover. |   |
If you have any questions you’d like to ask Susan and me, send a message (sr.projekt @ gmail); we’ll add your question and the answer to the page.
