Bruce Springsteen in the Photoshoot for the “Darkness on the Edge of Town” Album Cover, 1978

Darkness on the Edge of Town is the fourth studio album by Bruce Springsteen, released on June 2, 1978, by Columbia Records. The cover shot and inner sleeve photographs for Darkness were taken by then-unknown photographer Frank Stefanko inside his home in Haddonfield, New Jersey. Stefanko, introduced to Springsteen by Patti Smith, had not yet heard the album when the photo was taken and took the photos based on his perception of what Springsteen wanted.

Bruce Springsteen, Darkness front cover square crop (1978).

Bruce Springsteen, Darkness back cover square crop (1978).

“It was early 1978, and we were about to embark on  several sessions for the album, Darkness on the Edge of Town,” Stefanko recalled. “What I didn’t realize, at the time, was that our working relationship, and our friendship, would last for decades to come. Back when I first heard Bruce’s music in the early 1970s, I had a strong feeling that he would be famous. I had no conception, however, as to what a monumental icon he would become , or to the exalted heights he would ascend.”

“Forty years ago, when Bruce Springsteen and I were working on the album cover photos for Darkness on the Edge of Town, some of my babies slipped away and were lost for decades. Back then, before the days of digital photography and lightening fast E-mail, I used film in analog cameras. The processing and the transportation of these images was notoriously slow.”

The cover art for the album Darkness on the Edge of Town (1978) by Bruce Springsteen.

Bruce Springsteen recalled the first time he met and shot with Frank Stefanko. “I’d gotten to know Patti Smith a little through our work together on ‘Because the Night’. When I visited her during one of her performances at The Bottom Line, she gave me the name of a South Jersey photographer and said, ‘You should let this guy take your picture.’

“One winter afternoon I drove south to Haddonfield, New Jersey, and met Frank Stefanko. Frank had photographed Patti at the beginning of her career. My recollection is he borrowed a camera for the day, called a teenage kid from next door to come hold up his one light and started shooting. I stood against some flowery wallpaper in Frank and his wife’s bedroom, looked straight at the camera, gave my best ‘troubled young man’ look and he did the rest. One of those photos ended up on the cover of Darkness on the Edge of Town.

Frank’s photos had a purity and a street poetry to them. They were lovely and true, but they weren’t slick. Frank looked for your true grit and he naturally intuited the conflicts I was coming to terms with. His pictures captured the people I was writing about in my songs and showed me the part of me that was still one of them. We had other cover options but they didn’t have the hungriness of Frank’s pictures.”