Photography and design: Lizzie Nunnery, Hungry EP cover

Lizzie Nunnery, Hungry Ep cover photography and art direction

The idea

Was it really always 2008? Well, yes! Working with Lizzie Nunnery and her beautifully poetic music always brought out my appreciation of all things late 19th and early 20th century. And so my initial sketches for the cover had the ghost of Arthur Rackham's illustrations for Alice in Wonderland in them. Lizzie lost in so many words and ideas. A friend of mine owned a big house by the river Mersey with a library full of books on psychotherapy, and this became the set. I recall I had three lights, two big cast iron Bowens lights that could stop an invasion from Mars and a small plastic thing that only worked 60 percent of the time. The thing about ideas is that you don't always have to know where they come from. Sometimes they are like little birds that land on your antlers and whisper in your ears. In this situation, as with much of my work, it was more about finally realizing a long-harbored set of visual understandings – or at least articulating them until you understand them yourself. Case in point, the tower of books to the right was carefully built. Vermeer, Hitchcock, and Hopper all invite their viewers to pry, to look into the scene but from a safe position, where you can feel the emotion but not have to be dragged in. This scene is one where I invite the viewer to actually get dragged in. What is Lizzie thinking? Of course the phone rings before we go out and she has to go off and sing to a pub full of strangers. Apart from all that... I remember there was a piano in the corner, which her husband-to-be and collaborator Vidar Norheim was playing in the corner. I think this will be one of my photographs that I will look at forever with a sense of: "did I take that?". Shot on a Pentax K10D with possibly a 50mm lens, softbox and a shoot. James Wafer, Bluewhistle Design

Interior CD design