Rick Wright, Broken China Album Cover, 1996 (20/20)

"Richard Wright, fabled keyboard player from popular rock and roll ensemble Pink Floyd, made a solo album in 1996. Apart from the hallmarks of his lyricism and keyboard swashes, the theme of the album concerned, narratively speaking, the emotional breakdown of someone, occasioned by some unstated trauma followed by subsequent attempts at recovery. In essence there was a time before and a time after the breakdown - the former characterised by a wholeness and the latter by a broken quality. We imagined a human figure that was half natural and half fractured, yet being one and the same person. They say work begets work and this design was an adaptation of an uncompleted earlier idea about a magic disc through which one could pass as if through a time gate, from one zone to another. For Rick’s record we saw a woman divided by a disc of water, being whole and natural as she dived in, legs of flesh and bone, but fractured as she came though the other side, the upper body now made of broken china. It seemed an elegant and lyrical way of suggesting a breakdown, in sympathy with the music, and appropriate that the fractured half was literally made of pieces of broken china like a cracked jug (the back cover was the reverse, broken china legs and flesh or mended upper body to indicate the recovery). Also appropriate that the trauma was represented by a disc of water, not something heavy and dark, but more lyrical and liquid like the music." -- Storm Thorgerson

Release Notes:
Storm created a series called "20/20" comprised of 20 of his favorite images in limited editions of only 20 pieces (plus 2 Artist Proofs) each. Most certainly a play on the phrase "20/20" referring to perfect vision, the set was designed to showcase some of the pieces he valued most, including many of his more obscure album cover images.

Lambda Release Notes:
In 2008, Storm and SFAE celebrated Pink Floyd's 40th anniversary with an exhibition of signed photographs of images that he had created for the band over the years both as a founding member of the design collective Hipgnosis, and as an independent designer with StormStudios. These photographs were produced as signed, open editions and were only briefly available for sale as they were intended only for the anniversary celebration. Very few of any of these images were produced. 

Image Courtesy of Rick Wright. Photography by StormStudios.