READ // Photographer Cameron Wittig Discusses Album Art For ‘Dark Bird Is Home’ From The Tallest Man On Earth Via Half-Past

Midwest photographer Cameron Wittig recently sat down with Half-Past to discuss the striking album cover on Dark Bird Is Home, the newest album from The Tallest Man On Earth (aka Sweden’s Kristian Matsson). What started as a ‘friendship birthed from a chance meeting, some friendly conversation, and copious Wisconsin wedding whisky’, the two met in 2014 at a felow musician’s country wedding. When the time came around for a new album cover, Matsson trusted Wittig to give a face to his new project. From the article (Which you can read in full here)-

“It was to be a photographic reinterpretation of stories that came out of discussions about the record and the recording process in Sweden. The figure of Dark Bird was born on a mountaintop near the town where Kristian lives. She may or may not be real. It doesn’t matter in the end, as she is more powerful as a specter, this beautiful figure of uncertainty and change.”

Primarily a portrait photographer, Cameron recruited the talents of a friend to be his model for the cover as they travelled around his neighborhood shooting on the steps of houses that felt just right.

“I asked her to stand on the steps of houses that I selected based on how they looked or felt. Nothing was planned ahead of time. We did maybe six or seven different houses in various ways. Some were fancy houses, some were not. A few were abandoned. But it was always this figure in an ambiguous stance. She looks like she could be returning; frozen in a moment of contemplation anticipating what might happen once she rings the bell. Or perhaps she’s leaving and taking one last look at what her life was before she leaves forever. I didn’t really decide what that was going to be.”