[277] Galaxie 500 - Today (Aurora LP)

2025-08-18
Categories: galaxie 500 my record collection

My record collection
[277] Galaxie 500 - Today (Aurora LP)

The last credit on the back of Galaxie 500’s debut album Today reads “Photograph by Eugene Atget” - back in 1990, without access to the Internet you’d just accept that sort of credit as it is, look at the lovely, and rather unusual, picture on the front, and then slip the record out of its sleeve and get on with the business of listening.

So, for a long time I never really gave much thought to Eugene Atget. Things like was he a friend of the band? or what other albums covers he might have taken photos for? just didn’t cross my mind. But that all changed with the coming of the Internet, suddenly the urge to know everything can be satisfied - and those questions can now fairly easily be answered - for those two the answers are “no” and “none”, because he didn’t even take the photo for this album”.

Eugene Atget was a pioneer of photography who worked in the late 19th and early 20th century in Paris and was dead long before he could be commissioned to photograph for album covers. He took thousands of photographs of Paris and was considered a documentary photographer - taking photographs to provide an archive of the architecture and life of Paris, and also would suuply photographs for artists such as painters and stage designers. As such his work only became recognised as art after his death in 1927.

There is a lot of Eugene Atget’s photographs available - MoMA has 2,914 of his photos online and, after a little digging around I managed to track down the one that Naomi picked to use on Today:

Eugene Atget - Bagatelle, roseraie. 1921

Now obviously in 1988 when Naomi was designing the cover of Galaxie 500’s debut album she didn’t have the luxury of paging through the photos on MoMA’s website so I asked her how she came to find the photo and how she came upon the work of Eugene Atget:

My father was the photographer John Yang and so I grew up around a lot of classic black and white photography. My father had a large collection of photo books that I would look at, and we would go to photography shows together, usually at the Met or MoMa.

Eugene Atget was one of my father's favorite photographers, as was Minor White (whom he actually studied with in the 50’s for a summer), and Cartier Bresson, Edward Steichen, Andre Kertesz, Bill Brandt, Brassai…. the list goes on… so to me, these were household names! And so I knew their work at a young age.

So when I was thinking about the cover for “Today” I was just leafing through various books, wondering what might work, and I actually took the image for the cover of “Today” from a book my father had "The Work of Atget" (a multi-volume set, I can’t remember which volume) which was published by the Museum of Modern Art. In a way it is a strange juxtaposition: the word "Today" and an overgrown rose garden from 1921 in Paris, but somehow the lushness of it all seemed perfect to me.

Email from Naomi - 26th July 2025†

Naomi also mentioned that she “stole the classic layout of a Blue Note jazz album” ~ so the package was this wonderful mix of early 20th Century photography, mid 20th Century jazz design, and late 20th Century guitar rock ~ all combined to make this perfect, unique, and timeless album.

After Naomi’s email arrived I of course fell down a rabbit hole of Blue Note jazz album covers - I have a few Blue Note albums but none that were too close to Today… not as close as maybe this one…

Catalogue Number: AHFOW 12/032
Artist: Galaxie 500
Title: Today
Notes: Aurora LP
Format: LP
Bought on eBay around 2009 for a lot less than they go for now, although I can’t find how much.
Buy ‘Today’ on Bandcamp

Previously in my record collection:

† Of the photographers Naomi mentioned I was only familiar with the work of two of them, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Bill Brandt. So I had/have so much catching up to do!

My record collection[277] Galaxie 500 - Today (Aurora LP)

My record collection
[277] Galaxie 500 - Today (Aurora LP)