EMINEM - "Recovery" Album Cover

Date Viewed: 30/6/10
Cultural Perspective: American

An album cover that attracted my attention is the cover of EMINEMS latest album “Recovery”. This album was just released after he got out of rehab; they portray this idea a lot in this image. In the image we see EMINEM walking down an empty road with the words “Recovery” written in the top right hand corner in a bold font. Eminem is moved to the left of the image so we get a good view of the road. As the road gets further away it starts to blur. This image doesn’t seem like much but it does actually have a strong message.

EMINEM walking down a road is almost him going down the road to recovery which makes a Visual/Verbal link. He’s just been in rehab so I guess that’s part of the road to recovery. Also EMINEM’s back is facing towards us which is almost him facing his back to the drugs and going down a different road. This relates to the first idea. This gives us a strong message that he’s trying to get away from the drugs. Also in the font saying “Recovery” we see the ‘o’ presented as a health cross. This relates to him getting out of rehab and him being in better health.

EMINEM is shown as the dominant image in this image. He is the boldest object in this image because the road starts to blur out. This draws our attention to him when we first look at this image. They did this because it’s his road to recovery so the focus should be on him. Also the image has a really good layout because the text is on the other side of the image from the Dominant image. This makes it look less clustered and makes it look more effective.

In my opinion this is a really effective album cover. It doesn’t look like much from a glance but when you start to think about it and realise the real message that it’s trying to portray it is a really effective image presented in a simple way.