There are many songs inspired by personal photographs, from the Cure’s “Pictures of You” to Loudon Wainwright’s “The Picture,” but I was curious about songs that have been inspired by photographs that everyone can see, on postcards, as album covers, in galleries, newspapers, books, and magazines. I found nine such pairings, and spoke to some of the artists involved in them. You can listen to a Spotify playlist of most of the songs.
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Arnold Newman, “Alfred Krupp, Essen Germany” (1963)/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery/Getty
Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young’s “<a href="//play.spotify.com/track/29HaKOpeLSYvqdFyEQSRdj?play=true&utm_source=open.spotify.com&utm_medium=open" style="text-decoration:underline;" target="_blank">Teach Your Children</a>” was inspired by Arnold Newman’s portrait of Alfred Krupp and Diane Arbus’s “<a href="//www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2001.474" style="text-decoration:underline;" target="_blank">Child with Toy Hand Grenade</a>.” Graham Nash writes that seeing the two photographs exhibited side by side “spoke to me about the process of teaching and learning from our children. If we didn’t teach our children a better way of dealing with fellow human beings, then humanity might be doomed. The song was already being formed in my mind. I had bits and pieces, and this experience of the placement of these two images next to each other solidified my ideas, and the song was brought to life.”
*Correction: This post has been updated to correct the title of the fourth photograph.
