THE MONA LISA OF POP

Brian Duffy, David Bowie and the making of Aladdin Sane

There are album covers that belong to a record.

And then there are images that become part of popular culture.

Brian Duffy’s portrait of David Bowie for Aladdin Sane is one of them.

Bowie’s eyes are closed. His skin is almost impossibly pale. A red and blue flash cuts across his face and a strange silver droplet rests on his collarbone.

Today, the image is so closely connected with Bowie that it is difficult to imagine a time before it existed.

Yet in early 1973, it was simply the result of a brief from Bowie’s manager Tony Defries.

He wanted the new album to look expensive.

Very expensive.

Make it expensive

At the time, David Bowie was becoming a major international star.

The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars had transformed his career, and the next album needed an image with even greater impact.

According to the Duffy Archive, Defries deliberately wanted an album cover that would be costly to produce, partly to force RCA Records to invest heavily in Bowie and treat the release accordingly.

Brian Duffy understood the assignment.

Rather than simply photographing the Ziggy Stardust character again, Duffy and Bowie created something cleaner, stranger and more graphic.

The final image was printed using the dye-transfer process, one of the most expensive and sophisticated colour printing techniques available at the time.

Everything about it was designed to stand out.

Where did the lightning bolt come from?

The flash has become one of the most recognisable symbols in music history.

But its creation was surprisingly practical.

Duffy developed the graphic shape, while French makeup artist Pierre Laroche applied the red and blue design to Bowie’s face.

One account from the Duffy Archive recalls that the shape was influenced by a small lightning-style logo Duffy noticed on a Panasonic appliance in the studio. Bowie himself had also been interested in the lightning symbol used on Elvis Presley’s famous “TCB” jewellery.

Different references came together and, in the studio, became something entirely new.

A symbol that would eventually become almost shorthand for David Bowie himself.

And then there was the mysterious drop

The photograph did not end when Bowie left the studio.

Duffy worked closely with airbrush artist Philip Castle, known for his highly polished, futuristic illustration style.

Under Duffy’s direction, Castle added the strange liquid-like form on Bowie’s collarbone.

It is a small detail.

But remove it and the image changes completely.

The droplet makes Bowie appear less human, almost as if the perfectly constructed surface has begun to melt.

The result sits somewhere between photography, illustration, fashion image and science fiction.

Which, of course, was very Bowie.

Eyes closed. Eyes open.

Duffy made several photographs during the session.

The image chosen for the album shows Bowie with his eyes closed and became the version known around the world.

But another frame survived.

Same position.

Same lightning flash.

Bowie’s eyes open.

For decades, that photograph remained largely unseen.

More than thirty years later, the Duffy Archive rediscovered it among the surviving material from the session. In 2013, the Victoria and Albert Museum selected the Eyes Open portrait as the lead image for its major exhibition David Bowie Is.

The exhibition went on to tour internationally and attract more than two million visitors.

For a new generation, the outtake became almost as recognisable as the original.

So recognisable, in fact, that many people now mistake it for the actual Aladdin Sane cover.

A photograph bigger than the album

The album was released in April 1973 and became Bowie's most commercially successful record to that point.

But the photograph took on a life of its own.

The lightning flash has been copied, painted, printed, tattooed and recreated countless times. After Bowie’s death in 2016, it appeared everywhere, becoming a visual shorthand for the artist and the many identities he created throughout his career.

The image has often been called the “Mona Lisa of pop.”

It is an extraordinary description for a photograph originally made to sell a record.

But perhaps it fits.

Because even people who could not name every song on Aladdin Sane know the face.

Duffy and Bowie

The session was not an isolated collaboration.

Duffy photographed Bowie on five occasions and later created imagery for Lodger in 1979 and Scary Monsters (and Super Creeps) in 1980.

Together they created some of the defining images of Bowie’s career.

Duffy himself was one of the photographers who transformed British fashion photography during the 1960s, alongside David Bailey and Terence Donovan.

Then, remarkably, in 1979 he walked away from still photography.

He even burned a large part of his negative archive.

Much of what survives today exists because negatives and contact sheets were later recovered from magazines, newspapers and other archives.

That makes the photographs from the Bowie sessions feel even more significant.

More than fifty years later

In November 2025, an original dye-transfer print of the Aladdin Sane cover sold at Bonhams and set a new world record for album-cover artwork.

More than half a century after the shutter was released, the photograph had moved far beyond its original purpose.

It was no longer simply an album sleeve.

It had become a piece of photographic history.

One face.

One lightning flash.

And one image that helped define David Bowie forever.