On its website today, the South Florida Sun-Sentinel refers in a sidebar to a photogallery the paper’s site posted back in April 2008, a collection of 50 of the Worst Album Covers Ever.
This is a much more thorough version of an email forward you may have received a few years back. Basically, the slideshow is a lot of repackaged material of dubious provenance — a naked ploy for clicks. But, you know, more with less.
And fake or no, old or no, the display brings home with the piercing immediacy of the best photojournalism the all-too-recognizable issues of modern apathy and disaffection (Cody Matherson’s “Can I Borrow A Feelin’?”, #1); loss (Freddy Gage’s “All My Friends are Dead,” #45); and, in more than one case, the corporeal constraints that are both partners and adversaries in our drive to transcend mortality through art (“The Braillettes,” # 13; “The Handless Organist,” # 6).
And here words fail.
Kathy Gilsinan is the associate editor at World Politics Review