How This Normal-Looking Photo Became the Beatles’ ‘Rubber Soul’ Cover

“The album cover is another example of our branching out: the stretched photo,” McCartney acknowledged in Anthology. “That was actually one of those little exciting random things that happen. The photographer Robert Freeman had taken some pictures round at John’s house in Weybridge. We had our new gear on—the polo necks—and we were doing straight mug shots; the four of us all posing.”

McCartney added: “Back in London, Robert was showing us the slides; he had a piece of cardboard that was the album-cover size and he was projecting the photographs exactly onto it so we could see how it would look as an album cover. We had just chosen the photograph when the card that the picture was projected onto fell backwards a little, elongating the photograph. It was stretched and we went, ‘That’s it, Rubber So-o-oul, hey hey! Can you do it like that?’ And he said, ‘Well, yeah. I can print it that way.’ And that was it.”