With the passing of Storm Thorgerson, the world has lost one of its major artists. Thorgerson is especially known for his album covers (for Pink Floyd e.g.), but he was a graphic designer of all sorts, including a photographer and music video director.

Thorgerson, “the best album designer in the world” according to writer Douglas Adams, was a childhood friend of the founding members of Pink Floyd and he became their designer-in-chief, designing 15 album covers for them. Dave Gilmour, guitarist and vocalist for Pink Floyd, has said that Thorgerson’s artworks are “an inseparable part of our work.” Pink Floyd chose Thorgerson after they had seen work by him for a publishing friend of Thorgerson’s, in which he experimented with infrared photography. At that moment, Thorgerson shared a flat in South Kensington with his friend Aubrey Powell, who was a scenic designer at the BBC. In 1967 they began a partnership called Hipgnosis, combining “hip” with the Greek word “gnosis”, meaning “learning. Influenced by Man Ray, Magritte, Picasso, Kandinsky, Juan Gris and Ansel Adams, he had the opportunity to design covers for Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, the Nice, Paul McCartney, Black Sabbath, The Cranberries, Anthrax and very recently Belgian electro-rock band Goose.

His designs often include surreal elements, taking objects away from their context and placing them in new contexts to incite new meanings and highlighting their beauty. To quote Thorgerson, “I like photography because it is a reality medium, unlike drawing which is unreal. I like to mess with reality … to bend reality. Some of my works beg the question of is it real or not?”

Died aged 69, he has left an incredible aesthetic canon, ranging from album covers for Pink Floyd and music videos for The Alan Parsons Project to commercials and documentaries such as ‘The Art of Tripping’ (1993), on the effects of drugs on creativity. A small overview of his work: