Last September, a photo of a girl with a blank expression and a popped collar appeared online without any context. A few people assumed it was a viral ad, but most were drawn to it for reasons they couldn't quite place. Some combination of the girl's wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights stare, the Polo logo on her shirt, her slightly open mouth, the pinkish tone, and muted palette of the photograph suggested it was a "found" picture, or maybe a long-forgotten entry into Andy Warhol's Polaroid series. As it happened, the photo turned out to be the cover art for Vampire Weekend's second album. A few months later, an equally evocative, slightly older, and more private seeming snapshot of a woman, caught off guard while getting something from her closet, adorned the cover of the Dum Dum Girls' first LP I Will Be. As with the Contra photo, the questions arose quickly:Why her? Who is she? Why this photo?

Vampire Weekend claimed a provocative, and effective strategy with their photo. Ezra Koenig told MTV last January, "It's almost like a Rorschach test, because some people get very mad when they see a white blond girl in a Polo shirt. It makes you realize how much you can imagine about somebody when you know nothing about them, based on only a few signifiers." It's a brilliant move; the entirety of Contra summed up in a single suggestive image that serves as a dartboard for our conflicted feelings about class and commodities. The aural and visual of I Will Be don't quite connect in the same way, however: Everything about the photo signifies early 70s, but the music is very much early 60s. As it happened, Dee Dee couldn't acquire the rights to her first choice of photo-- a still from an Italian cult film about a women's prison-- but found the eventual selection while visiting her folks and flipping through photos. As she told us last January, Dee Dee stopped on a photo of her mother and said: "Something about that is exactly my record." A far-less exact equation than Koenig's, granted, and very different than her first choice, but still, she felt something.

A lot of indie artists lately have felt something similar, it seems. Artists who sound about as different from each other as Vampire Weekend and the Dum Dum Girls have embraced the look and feel of old, amateur photography, often featuring images of childhood and family. Stuart McLamb of the Love Language found a great image of his mother-- literally beaming in the unintended glare of a too-hot flash at night, and thought it the perfect album cover. Wolf Parade chose an image of a young Dante DeCaro and his two cousins to decorate the front of Expo 86, instead of some other evocation of the Vancouver World Expo they all attended. Crystal Castles moved from the very digital artwork for their first LP to a creepy snapshot they found on the internet that shows a young, goth-in-training girl walking away from a headstone. Fang Island decided to forever associate their first album of spazzy bro-punk with an adorable, faded-pink front-yard battle scene.

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Clockwise: Dum Dum Girls' I Will Be*;* Fang Island*; Wavves'* Wavvves*; Wolf Parade's* Expo 86

These are just recent examples. Over the past year, Wavves, Harlem, Dr. Dog, Toro Y Moi, Washed Out, Jaill, Woven Bones, and Active Child have each opted for shoebox-quality visuals as their sleeve decoration. Album art has long been a crucial multimedia component of popular music-- often the first image we associate with the sounds, its representational role makes it inherently evocative, a symbol containing so much meaning. But it's never lookedquite like this until very recently. Neither a label-sanctioned thing-- think Vaughan Oliver's work for 4AD or Peter Saville's for Factory-- nor even rooted in a shared artistic movement, this trend has instead emerged in a strangely naturalistic fashion.

The indie zine and DIY cultures dating back to the late 70s are a clear predecessor for this trend, as are the early 90s album covers of lo-fi godheads Sebadoh, but there are a few crucial differences. These are largely untouched amateur photographs-- they're not cut out of magazines, and they're not collaged or treated, aside from bits of identifying text-- many of them evoke ideas of childhood and family, and they stretch across a range of musical styles (if Crystal Castles and Dr. Dog are pulling from any similar aesthetic places, that's something to investigate). But there is a continuity, though: In interesting ways, these photographs echo back through the past few decades of indie and DIY culture as it intersects with amateur and art-world photography, changes in technologies, and shifting ideas of public and private. The evocative quality of an image presented without context, it turns out, makes for a interesting dialogue point between indie's aesthetic past and present.

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Here's a thought experiment: How would Jandek be received if he'd started his career in 2010? More than likely, the haunted, decontextualized photos he used as album covers would be either dismissed as some viral marketing ploy, or immediately outed by voracious bloggers seeking context. But from 1978 through the 80s and 90s, it was a very different set of circumstances. A series of atonal and bleak stream-of-consciousness laments started emanating from a mysterious Houston-based P.O. box called Corwood Industries. These transmissions seemed to be banged out and recorded exactly as they entered his mind. They were framed specifically as songs-- they had lyrics and instrumentation, they were listed with running times and titles-- but they could also qualify as stray terrifying thoughts, detached commentary on immediate surroundings, and literal descriptions of what you were listening to. For those who avidly followed Jandek through the 80s and 90s, the mystery itself was art.

The covers of Jandek's albums each contained evocative snapshots, which felt like clues to the life of this passionate, troubled loner. Douglas Wolk has called Jandek's music "absolute, pure self-expression, an unfocused, unlit snapshot of his entire adult life," and indeed, these sleeve photos were of fleeting moments, scooped up and separated from ordinary afternoons, archived and used to flesh out the iconography of the ultimate "outsider" musician. Blue Corpse shows Jandek walking past a building, and that album's lead track is called "I Passed by the Building". But it's not always so cut-and-dried as that. Stare at the blurry black- and-white photo of a shirtless Jandek kneeling over a garden, and connect that routine bit of backyard maintenance with the same guy taunting some imaginary demon, "I got my knife, if you want to breathe, baby," and then try to sleep without the lights on. Jandek's genius-- intentional or not-- was holding back information, making the longstanding musical ritual of decoding music and album art into a psychological game.

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Jandek's Blue Corpse and Graven Image

Motifs flowed through these photos over the years, and avid followers tried to piece together narrative coherence from them, to complete a story, like a serialized predecessor to what Found Magazine would do a couple of decades later. The biggest hints came via the various portraits of Jandek himself-- sometimes in silhouette and blurry profile, other times staring straight at the camera in full color. A few times he appeared to be a teenager, at others nearing middle age. Who took these pictures? Were they taken with the idea that they'd circulate, or were they meant for a more private display-- in a frame on a mantelpiece, or stuck behind cellophane in a photo album? Was Jandek's entire life fodder for an extended conceptual art project? Even after his recent self-outing and tour, these photos-- and Jandek's motives-- remain a compelling mystery.

Maybe Jandek was a fan of another eccentric Southerner with a fascination for reframing everyday life as art. William Eggleston was mesmerized by what he saw as the inherent surrealism of small towns in the American South, and he set about capturing it in the late 1960s. Through Eggleston's lens, a tricycle becomes an unreal evocation of domestic patriotism, an empty Amoco station an unsettling study of soft reds and blues, and a brick wall surrounds a parked car with disorienting perspective and blood-red tones. If Eggleston's pal Andy Warhol put the mass-produced products of consumer and celebrity culture onto the hallowed walls of galleries and museums, Eggleston celebrated the dreamlike ways that these items worked their ways into the lives of everyday folks. Eggleston is certainly much more of an artist's artist than Jandek, but the way he captures the everyday objects and average people around him can be just as spooky.

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William Eggleston's Graceland

Eggleston's 1976 debut at New York's Museum of Modern Art singlehandedly took color photography from National Geographic spreads and suburban birthday parties to the realm of high art, forever influencing the ways in which we look at the mundane stuff around us. Yet Eggleston's associations with the rock world are easily his most lasting contributions to culture. He's most known for his Graceland series, but it was his friendship with fellow Southern artist Alex Chilton that led to his legendary 1973 photograph "Greenwood, Mississippi" serving as the frontispiece for Big Star's equally legendary 1973 album Radio City. It doesn't take much to imagine the ceiling photo from Vampire Weekend's debut as a nice continuation of this visual theme, but Eggleston's work itself has proven popular over the years, spreading across disparate works in a more centralized way than today's amateur photographs have metastasized. There's Primal Scream's Give Out But Don't Give Up, Jimmy Eat World's Bleed American, Silver Jews' Tanglewood Numbers, Joanna Newsom's Ys Street Band EP and most recently, the lush greens and shocking red lampshade surrounding the bored kid on the cover of Spoon's Transference.

Big Star's Radio City*, featuring William Eggleston's "Greenwood, Mississippi"*

Next> Eggleston's continuing influence, Polaroid and Instamatics in the digital age