Black Hole Sun, won’t you come, and wash away the rain.
Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell unexpectedly passed away yesterday. His 1994 composition Black Hole Sun was a genre defining song for the grunge movement. An incredibly tragic loss for Generation X who grew up with the flannel wearing styles of the 90s.
Cornell graced numerous magazine covers during his lifetime, let’s take a look.
Jeff Lipsky did the honors for Rolling Stone with a set of images that were widely syndicated. Typical of Lipsky’s style, the image has a very natural feeling to it. Lipsky always does a great job of balancing strobe and ambient light. And the pose and styling are great. The cover is a crop of Lipsky’s landscape image.
The version from Colombia used a different image with very different post processing.
Germany’s Visions magazine featured Cornell on the cover of their December 2010 issue, and I wasn’t able to track down the photographer.
The tight shot uses a small light source that’s placed close to overhead, but not enough to completely obscure his eye sockets. The skin features suggest that the blue channel was juiced a little:
Verdict: The two images are simultaneously stunning and very different in feel. Instead of picking one because I’m a little bummed out, I’m going to leave you with a few of my favorite musical covers of Black Hole Sun. RIP Chris.
Scott Bradlee featuring Haley Reinhart:
SWANN featuring Nouela:
Ramin Djawadi from “Westworld”:
Brad Mehldau:
And lastly, Cornell covering Prince:
About the author: Allen Murabayashi is the Chairman and co-founder of PhotoShelter, which regularly publishes resources for photographers. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Allen is a graduate of Yale University, and flosses daily. This article was also published here.
