Barry Feinstein was an American photographer who was reputed to have produced over 500 album cover

Album cover

An album cover is the front of the packaging of a commercially released audio recording product, or album. The term can refer to either the printed cardboard covers typically used to package sets of 10" and 12" 78 rpm records, single and sets of 12" LPs, sets of 45 rpm records , or the front-facing...

s.

Barry Feinstein began in his youth as a photographer. In 1955 he was engaged as an assistant at Life

Life (magazine)

Life generally refers to three American magazines:*A humor and general interest magazine published from 1883 to 1936. Time founder Henry Luce bought the magazine in 1936 solely so that he could acquire the rights to its name....

 magazine. He subsequently became a sought-after photographer in Hollywood, where he worked with Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich was a German-American actress and singer.Dietrich remained popular throughout her long career by continually re-inventing herself, professionally and characteristically. In the Berlin of the 1920s, she acted on the stage and in silent films...

, Judy Garland

Judy Garland

Judy Garland was an American actress and singer. Through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years and for her renowned contralto voice, she attained international stardom as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage...

, Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston

Charlton Heston was an American actor of film, theatre and television. Heston is known for heroic roles in films such as The Ten Commandments, Ben-Hur for which he won the Academy Award for Best Actor, El Cid, and Planet of the Apes...

, Jayne Mansfield

Jayne Mansfield

Jayne Mansfield was an American actress working both in Hollywood and on the Broadway theatre...

, and Steve McQueen

Steve McQueen

Terrence Steven "Steve" McQueen was an American movie actor. He was nicknamed "The King of Cool." His "anti-hero" persona, which he developed at the height of the Vietnam counterculture, made him one of the top box-office draws of the 1960s and 1970s. McQueen received an Academy Award nomination...

. His works, as well as pictures of John F. Kennedy

John F. Kennedy

John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy , often referred to by his initials JFK, was the 35th President of the United States, serving from 1961 until his assassination in 1963....

 and Richard Nixon

Richard Nixon

Richard Milhous Nixon was the 37th President of the United States, serving from 1969 to 1974. The only president to resign the office, Nixon had previously served as a US representative and senator from California and as the 36th Vice President of the United States from 1953 to 1961 under...

, appeared in magazines such as Time, Esquire, and Newsweek.

In the 1960s, Feinstein became known as a photographer in the music scene. He accompanied Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan

Bob Dylan is an American singer-songwriter, musician, poet, film director and painter. He has been a major and profoundly influential figure in popular music and culture for five decades. Much of his most celebrated work dates from the 1960s when he was an informal chronicler and a seemingly...

on his 1966 tour of England and shot the cover photos of numerous albums, including from Janis Joplin, George Harrison, and the Rolling Stones. In 1974 he again went on tour with Bob Dylan, this time with The Band, around the United States.

An accident in 1993 affected Feinstein's ability to operate cameras. In 2008 he published two books: one contained 23 of his early Hollywood works together with Bob Dylan poems written in 1964, the second showed photos of Dylan's tours. Feinstein's photographs of the 1966 Bob Dylan Tour were exhibited in the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2009.

Barry Feinstein died on October 20 2011 at the age of 80 years in Woodstock, New York.

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