Elizabeth Joy Arnold saw all the recent posts about book covers with pictures of people photographed from behind, and passed along the story of how she almost had one of those covers for her latest, Promise the Moon, which comes out next month. “I guess wanting to be trendy, the Bantam art department designed a cover with the backs of three heads,” she emailed. “Everyone hated it, so they went back and reshot it in profile view, because they thought the profiles looked more ‘engaged,’ whatever that means.” Arnold went on to explain her theory that art directors like using pictures without faces to allow readers to form their own mental images of the characters. “I myself had a hard time equating these characters with the people who had been in my head for a year,” she comments. “They were waaaay too good looking and, a little more disturbingly, also didn’t match some of the descriptions I’d written.”
Photographer Miriam Berkley agrees with the identification theory, and offers another possible angle: If the pictures were taken without the subject’s knowledge, and the subjects aren’t identifiable, she says, the images can be used without getting model releases or other permissions.