Recovering and Discovering
Album Cover Artists
and Photographers
Wendy Hilty ( Wendelin Hilty)
We first thought that Wendy Hilty represented one of the few female photographers working for the major record companies of the era, but it turned out Wendy was the nickname of Wendelin Hilty, who was from either Switzerland or Liechtenstein (our sources disagree). Hilty came to the US in the 1930s and was a ski instructor before he became a successful photographer. His atmospheric photographs, which emphasized clear focus, saturated colors, and often rather theatrically posed models, appeared in high profile magazines, such as Argosyand Esquire, and he produced a series of ads for Canadian Club whisky that ran in Life magazine. Our attention was focused on the dozens of classic, glamorous LP covers that he produced for RCA Records during the 1950s, including iconic covers for recording artists Lena Horne, Diahann Carroll, and Perez Prado. He moved to St. Croix in the late 1950s and entered the tourism and real estate business. He died in 1978. Hilty brought his staged and stylized aesthetic to his album cover work. We especially like his distinctive cover photography for RCA’s “Dinner Music” series that we discuss in the book, which captures stereotypical, yet appealing, images for Music for a German Dinner at Home, Music for an Italian Dinner at Home, and Music for a Back Yard Barbecue (which functions as the “American Dinner at Home”). We think of the “Dinner Music” albums as precursors to television cooking and decorating shows, or YouTube videos, perhaps designed for newly housed suburbanites with few fine dining options nearby. The cover of Music for a Back Yard Barbecue presents two large, char-grilled steaks atop a suspiciously shiny grill, with a set of yellow sauce bowls adorned with skewers of mixed fruit and vegetables in sharp focus in the foreground; several partygoers anchor the background. In the end, the “Dinner Music” series included only five LPs, but together, they present a window into earnest postwar strivings for cosmopolitan lifestyles. Like the steaks on the cover, Hilty’s staged tableaux provide a perfectly done accompaniment to the LP, serving up a tasteful and appealing vision of a mid-century meal. Recovering and Discovering Album Cover Artists and Photographers November 1, 2017 (The MIT Press) |
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Album Notes |
