Drummer and Missy's Place

[Biowatch]

Man on ‘Led Zeppelin IV’ cover identified_at_auction



https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/arts/music/led-zeppelin-iv-album-cover.html

Nov. 8, 1971, …“Led Zeppelin IV.” [released.] It features the band’s major hit “Stairway to Heaven,” and the wordless cover shows the image of a bearded, older man with a large bundle of sticks on his back against the backdrop of a decaying wall.

Now, 52 years later to the day, a minor mystery about that cover has been solved.

…the image, it turns out, was a Victorian-era photograph of a man who made thatched roofs for cottages in Wiltshire, a rural county in southwestern England. His name was Lot Long and he was 69 at the time, according to Brian Edwards, a researcher who found the photo.

Mr. Edwards, a visiting research fellow at the University of the West of England, stumbled upon the picture in March while scouring the internet for new releases at auction houses that might be interesting for his research, which includes the area’s well-known landmark Stonehenge.

As he was looking through a Victorian photo album full of landscapes and houses, Mr. Edwards noticed a photo he had seemingly seen before…

The photo album’s first page states, “Reminiscences of a visit to Shaftesbury,” and is made out as “a present to Auntie from Ernest.”

Based on that information, Mr. Edwards researched the origins of the photo album and was able to conclude that the photographer was a man by the name of Ernest Howard Farmer.

… Legend has it that Robert Plant, Led Zeppelin’s vocalist, and his bandmate Jimmy Page were in an antique shop in Pangbourne, a village about 50 miles west of London along the River Thames, where they spotted a colorized version of the photograph that will be on view in the Wiltshire Museum.