Bob Egan’s PopShots blog has a wonderful deconstruction of Neil Young’s iconic After the Goldrush album cover. In the above shot, you see the image in context, where it was shot at Sullivan and 3rd Street, just off Washington Square Park in New York’s Greenwich Village.

After Egan’s exhaustive coverage was posted on his blog, Young’s archivist Joel Bernstein, who took the shot, wrote in with his recollection of the shoot, as well as sending in the original, uncropped photo with Graham Nash standing to the side:

“The photo was not “a mistake.” I saw the small, old woman coming towards us down the sidewalk, was intrigued, and wanted to catch her passing Neil. The mistake, to me, was that I had in my haste focused the lens just past the two figures, closer to the fence than to Neil’s face. That was the original reason why I made a small-sized print and solarized it; to help with the apparent sharpness. But the solarization in this case added a somewhat spooky dimension to the image, which Neil took to immediately.”

Read more at PopShots
 

Photo by Joel Bernstein, 1970