'Casher' print by Robert Speker with Sydmar Lodge Care Home

Print 'Casher' reconstruction album cover by Robert Speker, 2020. Produced with Sydmar Lodge Care Home residents and staff during the first Covid-19 Lockdown in the UK. Copying an album cover by Johnny Cash, Marion is shown in profile in black and white, in deep shadow. Lettering in white above. Printed at the size of a standard LP record sleeve.

This set of 12 Care Home Album Covers attracted significant media attention in July 2020 after being tweeted by photographer Robert Speker. Working as Activities Coordinator at Sydmar Lodge Care Home, North London, Speker collaborated with residents and staff to recreate a series of famous album covers. In each case the figures in the album photographs are replaced by a care home individual, and the artist’s name or album title are replaced with the new sitter’s name or a reference to the care home.

Marion appears in the seventh photo in the series, which recreated Johnny Cash's 2002 album ‘American IV: The Man Comes Around’. Speker explains that he “chose this album cover purely on the basis that Marion's surname was Casher. However, she posed perfectly with little make-up or setting required apart from the lighting on Marion's face. Sadly, Marion passed away shortly after the photo was taken, and never saw the project come to fruition. However, Marion's family wanted the image included as a tribute to her, and they were delighted with the outcome and the response.”

These first 12 album covers produced by Speker and care home contributors were developed into a charity calendar for the Alzheimer’s Society for 2021. Together they help to capture the particular experience of those living and working in care homes during the Covid-19 pandemic, which attracted wide media attention and public criticism for seeming to be ‘abandoned’ and for the extreme isolation imposed on residents, unable to see loved ones for many months. Equally, however, Speker’s joyful work demonstrates the creativity that flowered across society during the first lockdown, and the work by many artists to offer support – whether financial or emotional – to NHS staff, the wider public, and each other.