Cover stars, ready to explore the stratosphere.

I love Morrissey’s design sense when he isn’t putting records on his dick. Entirely responsible for the Smiths’ LP and single covers, and still heavily involved now that the world is slicker, he has played violins, hefted guns and babies, burped and lain on railroad tracks for Art. He is also the world champion in pairs publicity shots. There is a poster of him, Marr and some daffodils which still strikes me as dangerous (not because it’s “homoerotic,” whatever that means, but because it’s a professionals’ marriage portrait), and the 2006 image of Kristeen Young displayed on his shoulders in saddle shoes is an lovably queasy evocation of Lolita, let down only by the camera’s catching everyone’s faces at a slightly inopportune moment.

But this post is primarily about those Smiths sleeves -vintage advertisements, film stills and newspaper photographs- and particularly the odd moment that recurs whenever you see something that clearly fits among them – like the image of Wiley Post in an early pressure suit (below), which I found on Boing Boing the other day. The strange business (a camera?) at crotch level, the wrapped and protected body, the caption, the sense that the context has died with the years – it could fit between “Hand In Glove” (Jim French photo of bare-assed fellow) and “This Charming Man” (Jean Marais as a Narcissus-like Orpheus, asleep by a mirroring pond – an image Young briefly glances toward in her gorgeous sleeve for Music For Strippers, Hookers and the Odd On-Looker).

The Smiths’ visuals were incredibly important in teaching me to recognize the melancholy of low camp. I know that many of them come from “high” sources, but the fact that they mix art films with Seventies soap operas is itself as camp as camp can get. It’s about the sadness of things that lack context; you can find out the source of the still, and quite often the reference is interesting, but the initial strike is all about the total isolation of the image.