This is the original photo used for the Desaparecidos cover art. On the CD version this photo is on the front of the insert, under the vellum sheet that has the houses and titles on it. You only see the left half, the trees are cropped out.
Conor, his cousin Ian, and I went for a drive out in west Omaha for the afternoon to take album artwork photos. The sprawl was bad then, but it’s worse now. You’d have to drive even further out to get photos like this.
If you notice at the bottom of the photo (and the album cover) there is crop stubble above the road, and tilled dirt below it. That’s because if you faced north there was working farmland, and if you turned to face south you’d see a solid panorama of housing developments… literally across the street from one another. The back cover of the CD is the exact same spot, just facing south! You can’t even see the ground in the back cover photo.
The funny thing is that the album cover concept for the Desa record became reality. The farm in this photo turned into another housing development a few years after the record came out.
