04.09.2025 | Latest

ECM Cover Artwork | Dieter Rehm

A central fixture responsible for much of the distinct imagery on the ECM cover art from 1978 onward, Dieter Rehm’s photography and cover designs remain a pillar in the field, with a graphic language and a unique signature wielding influence beyond genre-borders. A photographer at heart – and his focus has always remained the art of shooting pictures – Rehm expanded his idiomatic reach and craft through close collaboration with producer Manfred Eicher and Barbara Wojirsch, the main ECM cover-designer at the time, whose work in typography would become an important influence on Rehm.

Before Rehm came into the fold, most early ECM covers were fashioned by the husband and wife team of Burkhart and Barbara Wojirsch (B.&B. Wojirsch). Their artwork led to some of the most powerful and renowned covers of the label’s over half a century spanning history. Eicher had initially met Burkhart Wojirsch in the producer’s hometown of Lindau. The graphic artist later moved to Stuttgart, where he studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts and met his future wife Barbara. After her husband’s premature death in the mid-70s, Barbara Wojirsch continued the work on ECM covers, carrying the torch until well into the 90s.

Rehm joined ECM at Wojirsch’s side in 1978. His photography was experimental and brought a new graphic language to the mix. The photographer’s impressionistic style stemmed from an amalgamation of various techniques, including a penchant for long exposure, letting bright lights glow and glide through pictures like streams. His photographs used for Azimuth’s Touchstone (ECM 1130), Gary Burton’s Whiz Kids (ECM 1329) or for Aparis (ECM 1404) by Markus Stockhausen are but a few of many examples illustrating this technique.

Other approaches of Rehm’s include developing slide film like a negative film, with the main difference lying in the image output: slide film produces a direct positive image with true colours, while negative film creates an inverted image with reversed light and dark areas – “The effect is that the colours gallop away,” Rehm notes. He shifts the tonal values of scanned black-and-white negatives and plays with positive-negative effects. The covers of Mick Goodrick’s In Pas(s)ing (1139) and Rabih Abou-Khalil’s Nafas (1359) make use of this process, among others – Nafas being a particularly unique example, as the positive can be seen on the cover, while its negative was used for the LP’s back. The cover shows the Pyramid of Saqqara, south of Cairo, also known as the Step Pyramid of Djoser, the oldest pyramid in Egypt.

Lester Bowie’s Avant Pop and David Torn’s Cloud About Mercury make use of the effect created when pointing a camera at a monitor, often termed “moiré effect” or “camera feedback effect”. It arises from the interference between the overlapping patterns of the monitor’s pixels and the camera’s image sensor – the repeated re-recording of an image by the camera producing restless patterns and distortions.

For the artwork of John Abercrombie’s Night (1272), Rehm took a photo of a back alley wall in New York City with a Richard Hambleton (aka the Shadowman) figure drawn on it and flung his own lines across the photograph – including the album title. For the works series covers from 1988, Rehm used photos whose’ films he degraded by cooking the slides in water – as a result the photographic emulsion partially dissolves, wrinkling the grain to a positive-negative effect. There’s an element of arbitrariness to this process, and not all photos and approaches seen on Rehm’s covers came about on purpose…

When Rehm visited New York in 1981 he took a series of accidentally overexposed slide films while walking through the city. One of the pictures captured a 1981 New York Checker taxi (the model was produced until 1982), its motion creating a blur and slight distortion with delicate pastel tones as a result – it ended up as the cover for Terje Rypdal and David Darling’s EOS. The same type of accidentally overexposed image also graces the cover of Charlie Mariano & The Karnataka College of Percussion’s JYOTHI.

A recurring, even omnipresent theme in Rehm’s work are photos taken either from a moving vehicle, or perspectives looking onto streets and highways. In Pas(s)ing is again an example, so is the cover of Richard Beirach’s ELM (ECM 1142), Pat Metheny’s New Chatauqua (ECM 1131) John Clark’s Faces (ECM 1176) and many more. One doesn’t have to look all too closely to spot Rehm’s very own Ford Capri II (built 1975) in Modena green on the cover of the latter – “The rear had a 120 cm wide trunk opening, allowing me to load large canvases,” Dieter Rehm still recalls today. One can even see Rehm himself here – now looking more closely – or at least a ghostly shimmer of him, created by long exposure and his not standing still while taking the picture himself, triggered through a wireless flash. It’s not the only time that a kind of remote controlled self-portrait of his landed on an ECM cover, as Lester Bowie’s The Great Pretender (ECM 1209) and the eponymous Everyman Band (ECM 1234) album prove. “In order to capture the dark landscape the exposure had to be very long,” Rehm remembers. The flash then images what is within its range and reflects brightly. With the wireless flash in hand I was then able to move freely in the scene and take multiple pictures in the process.

Rehm has also experimented with more layered approaches: On David Torn’s Best Laid Plans and Koch, Schütz and Käppeli’s Accélération – for example – black Letraset rubdwon punctuation marks are superimposed on the subject in a “sandwich” process, to quote Rehm’s words – “They are applied onto the slide or negative and then enlarged.” For Torn, the slide subject is the Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw (photographed in 1983 during the Jazz Jamboree Festival – the cover exhibition took place inside the building). For Koch, it is a negative of the limestones of the Temple of Hatshepsut, west of the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt.

Many of Dieter Rehm’s covers and artworks are currently featured in an exhibition in Memmingen, Germany and will remain on display through 14 September 2025.