The picture above is an album cover of a popular Pink Floyd album “Wish You Were Here”. At a glance you can notice the main focus is a still frame of two men shaking hands while on is on fire. Along the side of the image is a thin white strip with the album title along with a small symbol of a metal object over four smaller segments. This smaller portion is being burned slightly at the top as well. Looking deeper into the picture you can see the men are standing in what appears to be a backlot of warehouses or television recording studios. The man on fire appears to not notice his conflagration as well, and is more focused on the handshake instead. A closer look at the symbol in the bottom right shows it to be two metal hands embracing over four smaller pictures of the sun, the sky, water, and earth.
Analyzing the picture leads to some interesting points. For one although it is the cover of an album there is no artist listed on the artwork. This can be tied in to the fact that the artist wanted to remain anonymous, at least at a cursory glance. This also ties in to the symbol, which to an uninformed viewer may not mean much. Originally the album did not feature this small symbol on the main cover, but instead was wrapped in a black cellophane with the symbol on the plastic. This more than likely means that it was superimposed onto the album cover when it was produced on a CD and no longer needed the cellophane. Delving deeper into the main picture the fact that the man is on fire and getting burned while shaking the other’s hand must have a double meaning. As a matter of fact in the music industry “getting burned” was slang for not receiving royalty payments from your recording label. Knowing that this is the focus of the image along with two mechanical hands embracing suggests that the music industry is often uncaring and greedy. The title “Wish You Were Here” also might convey a sense of wanting protection from the heartless record companies but in fact has a much more personal meaning. Syd Barrett, Pink Floyd’s original guitarist, left the band in 1968 after serious drug abuse and subsequent mental decline. Pink Floyd proceeded to tribute the 1975 album to their formal bandmate, including a song spanning half the album titled “Shine on You Crazy Diamond”. This picture. although complex, attempts to express the band’s personal feelings towards their lives, careers, and emotions all in one package.