Squaring the Circle: Hipgnosis and the Art of the Album Cover
Anton Corbijn’s documentary “Squaring the Circle (The Story of Hipgnosis)” is a loving, lucid tour through the golden age of rock album design and a nuanced portrait of the two men at its center: Storm Thorgerson and Aubrey “Po” Powell. Corbijn, himself a seminal music photographer and filmmaker, knows the terrain intimately, and he steers the film with a photographer’s eye for texture and a designer’s sense of negative space. The result is both a tactile celebration of craft—contact sheets, scalpel cuts, paste-ups, darkroom magic—and a bittersweet study of creative partnership under pressure.
If you came for the hits, you’ll get them in glorious close-up. The film lingers over the canonical Hipgnosis sleeves—Pink Floyd’s prism and rainbow beam, the faceless handshake on “Wish You Were Here,” the pig adrift above Battersea Power Station, Led Zeppelin’s molten fairy-tale sprawl on “Houses of the Holy,” Peter Gabriel’s smeared portraits—to unpack not just their concepts but their physical making. Corbijn and editor Andrew Hulme give us the pleasure of seeing images as objects: light catches matte paper; a corner frays; a contact print reveals a decision mid-gesture. In an era when album art is often a thumbnail, the documentary returns us to the 12-inch square as a stage where Surrealism, pop fantasy, and sly humor collided with mass culture.
What elevates the film beyond a greatest-hits reel is its human center. Hipgnosis, the company, is really the mixed chemistry of two temperaments. Powell’s recollections have the genial cadence of a producer who remembers logistics, budgets, and crews. Thorgerson—mercurial, stubborn, gleefully contrarian—emerges as the conceptual spark, prone to pushing ideas until they became events. The movie thrives in that tension: Powell strategizing a shoot at dawn after dawn on the Giant’s Causeway; Thorgerson insisting on staging a man literally on fire to make a metaphor legible. Their best sleeves feel inevitable now, but Corbijn shows how often they were improbable, expensive gambles that relied on audacity and patient craft.
The interviews are deftly cut. Musicians who trusted Hipgnosis—members of Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin, Peter Gabriel, and others—don’t simply reminisce; they trace how an image could crystallize a sound or an ethos. One recurring theme is the deliberate refusal of literalism. Hipgnosis sleeves rarely depict the band; instead they construct a parallel narrative space where the music can resonate. Corbijn draws a straight line from this strategy to the lasting mythos of these records: by not telling you what to think, the image becomes a portal you step through every time the needle drops.
Corbijn’s own aesthetic choices are smartly restrained. Much of the new material is shot in crisp black-and-white, a choice that both nods to his photographic roots and keeps the focus on faces and hands—on memory and making. Color floods in for the sleeve art, and the contrast gives those images a ceremonial weight. The pacing is relaxed but purposeful; the film understands that part of the joy here is dwelling, letting your eye wander across a fold-out or puzzle over an inexplicable gesture.
The documentary is also frank about the costs of running an imagination-driven business in the high-stakes, high-ego world of ’70s rock. Success breeds bloat; bloat breeds strain. Hipgnosis’s expansion into a larger enterprise (and the sheer volume of commissions) nudged the partnership toward friction. Corbijn doesn’t turn this into a melodrama, but he doesn’t dodge the melancholy either: creative triumph sits alongside financial stress, frayed friendships, and the inevitability of changing times. When punk and then MTV recalibrated the image economy, the slower, lavish mise-en-scène of Hipgnosis felt out of step. The film captures that shift without sneer or nostalgia—a cultural weather report as much as a corporate autopsy.
If there’s a limitation, it’s the documentary’s perspective. “Squaring the Circle” is distinctly affectionate; it’s less investigative than curatorial. We hear less from the less-storied collaborators—assistants, retouchers, the unsung technicians—whose hands completed these miracles. And while the film touches on the risky stunts and sometimes cavalier methods that produced iconic shots, it generally frames them as expressions of artistic necessity. A sharper counterpoint—more voices from outside the Hipgnosis orbit, or a deeper dive into how gender and power worked on those sets—would have complicated the legend in productive ways.
Still, for anyone who cares about design, photography, or the rituals of listening, this is an essential watch. The documentary makes a compelling argument that album sleeves weren’t just packaging; they were narrative engines and memory machines. Hipgnosis understood that a record is an object with aura, and they engineered that aura through analog sleight of hand: long exposures, in-camera composites, polaroid manipulations, trompe-l’œil sets built in windswept landscapes. Corbijn’s film is alive to this physicality. You can almost smell the glue, feel the dry fiber of a gatefold, sense the quiet of a studio after a shoot when the image first “clicks.”
The title’s paradox—squaring a circle—points to the larger feat Hipgnosis pulled off for a decade: reconciling mass commerce with idiosyncratic art. Corbijn squares his own circle by making a film that is at once celebratory and clear-eyed, visually elegant yet modest in its conclusions. He doesn’t try to improve the images; he frames them and lets them breathe. By the end, you’ve not only revisited a gallery of classics, you’ve spent time with two collaborators whose shared stubbornness changed how music looked. The documentary honors that legacy without embalming it, reminding us that the most enduring icons often begin as a strange idea and an insistence on doing it for real. For fans of rock history and devotees of graphic design alike, it’s a beautifully crafted love letter to an art form that taught us to listen with our eyes.
