The history of photography is teeming with portraits of musicians made iconic through their use on album covers: Thelonious Monk by W. Eugene Smith; Miles Davis by Irving Penn; Grace Jones by Jean Paul Goode; Laurie Anderson by Robert Mapplethorpe. Includes record albums featuring images by David Bailey, Guy Bourdin, Anton Corbijn, Roy DeCarava, Robert Frank, Lee Friedlander, Nan Goldin, Luigi Ghirri, John Paul Goode, Brian Griffin, William Klein, David LaChapelle, Danny Lyon, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jean-Baptiste Mondino, Ryan McGinley, Helmut Newton, Martin Parr, Anders Peterson, Pierre et Gilles, Hiro, Cindy Sherman, W. Eugene Smith, Pennie Smith, Jurgen Teller, Jeff Wall, Andy Warhol, Albert Watson, William Wegman, and more.

In The Age of Total Images, art historian Ana Peraica focuses on the belief that the shape of the planet is two-dimensional which has been reawakened in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, and the ways in which these 'flat Earth' conspiracy theories are symptomatic of post-digital image culture. Such theories, proven to be false both in Antiquity and Modernity, but once held to be true in the Medieval Period, have influenced a return to a kind of 'New Medievalism'.