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In 1978, just as punk was very publicly running out of steam in the UK, Prince’s first album was released. It arrived to very little fanfare; at the time, the music scene comprised mainly a confusing muddle of angry revolutionaries, refugees from the disco era and a few pioneering ‘new wave’ artists, all ready to be the next big thing. Prince, it turned out, would possess a little of each of these characteristics, along with many more compelling musical attributes.
The cover design of the first album, For You1, was deliberately enigmatic and understated. It depicted simply the artist in a motion-blurred, over-saturated headshot taken by Joe Giannetti.
In an interview with Liz Raiss for Fader magazine, Giannetti offered some insight into the development of this first cover design. “He was just beginning when I was hired to shoot the For You album cover. At the time, there weren’t a lot of makeup artists who understood how to do makeup for [black] people. But he had found someone who knew,” he said.