Backstory: Alistair O’Neill on photographs and book covers

The British writer Rachel Cusk’s celebrated Outline trilogy, published between 2014 and 2018, concerns a series of journeys a writer named Faye takes in Europe. In one, Faye encounters a woman who is obsessed with the work of a painter. “What she was trying to say was that she wasn’t interested in them objectively, as art,” Cusk writes. “They were more like thoughts, thoughts in someone else’s head that she could see.”

A recent spate of well-regarded novels has taken the use of photographs in book-jacket design into new territory for structuring a relationship between word and image. The U.K. Faber edition of Cusk’s trilogy (and also the U.S. Picador edition), designed by Rodrigo Corral, makes use of still lifes by the fashion photographer Charlie Engman. The thick, white border and the bold, black all caps frame an image that offers a way into thinking about what the title of the novel might refer to. But after reading it, you realize how provisional its illustrative nature is. Corral’s design was in reaction to reading Cusk’s prose: “It isn’t super linear. It’s more about being part of the journey,” he says.

• https://aperture.org/magazine/aperture-2...