Bradley Cook knows a thing or two about album covers, having photographed the album cover for Buddy Guy’s Born to Play Guitar, which won the Grammy Award for best blues album in 2016. Now, Cook is working on his passion project honoring the covers that became the faces of popular culture. At Dot Dotson’s Photo Finishing, his exhibit Covers: Celebrating the Lost Art of Album Photography, Cook and lighting director Bob Williams (who Cook deems “the father of lighting”) have recreated six of rock’s most famous album covers. These include both Fleetwood Mac’s eponymous album and Rumours; The Eurythmics’ Touch’ and Joe Jackson’s Body and Soul. Cook says he recreated the covers as accurately as he possibly could, only utilizing technology for each photo that would have been available at the time. Shooting each recreation with 50mm film, Cook says that he had to be “a MacGyver and a photographer all at the same time.” An example of this was on the album for their recreation of Steely Dan’s 1977 album Aja, where he used a funnel and a 4-foot-long piece of 3/4 inch irrigation pipe to get the dot of light just right on the model. That being said, “little mistakes were made in each one, and it’s fun to catch them.” He says that the way he has been able to avoid copyright trouble for his exhibit is by not selling or collecting profit from any of the photos. “If we were putting these up for sale, oh my God I’d be bankrupt,” he says. He says with online music streaming, the appreciation for album cover’s beauty and art has been lost. “When you remove the artist from the equation, it feels like something’s missing.”

Covers: Celebrating the Lost Art of Album Photography, is on display 10 am to 5:30 pm Monday through Friday, and 10 am to 2 pm on Saturday through Oct. 2 at Dot Dotson’s Photo Finishing, 1668 Willamette Street.