Behind the Cover: Pre-Photoshop Magic
This was my first single cover, back in 1992, right after House of Pain was blowing up. The group was called No Concept, totally independent, with a song called Help Us, We’re Dope, and We Can’t Get Up. I wanted the cover to match that title — something dramatic, visually literal, but impossible: a guy hanging off a building.
In the pre-digital era, there was no Photoshop. So I had to get creative. I thought, “What if I photograph the Twin Towers from below, then flip the image so it looks like they’re falling?” I was lucky enough to stand between the towers on a foggy day — the tops of the buildings disappeared into the low fog, which made it perfect for the illusion.
Then I got my friend Myron Young, who posed on a ledge near my house, hanging off the edge. The challenge: how do you combine these two impossible shots into one image? The secret was Kodalith film — a high-contrast black-and-white film that photographers used to create masks. Everything on the film was either black or white — no grays. Black blocked light, white let it through. Using Kodalith, I could isolate the elements I wanted from each image. Both Images the buildings and the subject were shot on slide film. A positive film. With the positive I was able to project Myron’s image into a Kodalith, below you see my hand holding the actual Kodalith mask I made.
The process was intense:
– Shoot two positives — the towers and Myron hanging.
– Project them through the Kodalith mask onto a single sheet of 4×5 film.
– Carefully align everything so it looks seamless.
The result? A single, dramatic image of someone “falling” off a building, long before Photoshop made this kind of effect easy. Complicated? Yes. But that’s what we had to do to turn imagination into reality.
I didn’t do to many of this type of special fx’s, only a handful, because by the time photoshop truly took off, this process became obsolete… at least I got to experience it.
Disclaimer: Ten years after this image was created, the World Trade Center would tragically be destroyed on 9/11. This image is not related to that event and is not intended to offend any victims or survivors of the tragedy. It was created ten years prior, purely as a creative concept.