Sleevefacing

Sleevefacing, in my opinion, is just utter genius. It’s something anyone can do and enjoy. All you need is a camera, spend a small amount of time glancing through some of your existing possessions for an appropriate ‘sleeve’ to ‘face’, and a friend to take the photo.

The basic principle of sleevefacing is that you hold up the sleeve or cover of an album or book in such a way that the contours of the person or face on the cover align with those of your own body, and photograph it.

Just like this one:

Vinyl record sleeves lend themselves particularly well to the idea because:

• They are nice and big, so your model can usually hold it themselves.
• They have an arty kind of nostalgia to them.

The beauty of the concept is that it’s so easy to have a go yourself and there are just hundreds of examples scattered all over the web. The weirder and more original the better!

It doesn’t really matter if the edges don’t quite line up or the original image looks out of context because that’s exactly the point. You take an existing piece of artwork, which is probably already well known to some extent as it has already been published, and then you place it in an entirely new environment. Sometimes it works seamlessly and sometimes it clashes, and to me those clashes are what really spark interest to make a photo stand out, for example here’s some of my favorites:

There are many, many more at sleeveface.com

Andrew Riches

I'm a full time audio engineer and am obsessed with how things work. Currently I am indulging my inner-geek at cobaltaudio.com where I am currently the lead blogger and primary engineer.