An album cover has to survive a lot of contexts a normal photograph doesn't: a thumbnail on a streaming app, a full sleeve in someone's hands, a press page reprinting it at a size nobody planned for. The official credit on Eda Zari's Palimpsest reads “Photo and art cover by Ergys Shehu” — and that phrase, “art cover,” is doing more work than it looks like.
More than a photoshoot
A single photograph and an album's visual identity are not the same deliverable. The image has to carry a title, hold up against text overlays, and represent a body of music it can't literally depict. That's art direction — deciding what the object means before deciding how to light it — layered on top of the photography itself.
What "Palimpsest" asks of an image
A palimpsest is a manuscript with earlier writing still faintly visible underneath the newer text — layers that don't fully erase each other. The specific visual treatment used to evoke that idea on this cover — whether through composition, texture or another technique — is a detail worth describing precisely once it's drawn from the actual production notes rather than reconstructed after the fact.
Where the image went next
Credit lines are one measure of an image's reach, and this one traveled further than the original release: the German outlet Lippische Landes-Zeitung used the photograph in their own coverage, crediting it to Ergys Shehu. A cover image doing press duty in another country, in another language, is a different kind of validation than a “like” count — it means the image was useful to someone else's storytelling, not just decorative.
Photography as visual identity
This is the part of the work that doesn't fit neatly into “photographer” as a job title. Building an album's cover image means thinking like a designer about hierarchy and legibility, like a fan about what the music actually feels like, and like a photographer about light and composition — at the same time, for the same single frame. That's the throughline across projects like this one: photography that's asked to hold cultural weight, not just document a moment. Palimpsest is one entry in that column. It won't be the last on this Journal.