Description

After four years of silence, Frank Ocean returned with a photograph of himself hiding. Wolfgang Tillmans, the German artist who had won the Turner Prize, shot Ocean in the shower with his hair dyed a vivid green, one hand pressed over his face and his eyes closed, in a pose i-D compared to a Pre-Raphaelite painting. The picture is intimate and guarded at the same time, a fitting introduction to a record about memory, love and privacy.

Even the title on the cover is a puzzle. The small lettering on the front reads "blond", while streaming services list the album as Blonde. Fans have read the two spellings as a reference to the album's gendered and doubled points of view, and Ocean never explained the difference.

The release itself was an event. The album appeared on 20 August 2016 on Ocean's own label, Boys Don't Cry, the day after pop-up shops in Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and London handed out a free magazine of the same name containing a CD of the record. The magazine was full of photography by Tillmans, Viviane Sassen and others, and copies vanished within hours. Artnet later wrote that Tillmans's cover still "looms large" in his career, and it has become one of the defining album images of the decade.

Credit

Photography by Wolfgang Tillmans