Originally Posted by
gorast
Had a bizarre revelation just now. I was looking through some Fragile-era artwork, and came across the cover for Things Falling Apart, and as I stared at it for a few seconds, I suddenly realized what the cover actually is. For as long as I've been into NIN, I'd always just sort of written off the TFA cover as some weird abstract tendril shit. But my caveman brain finally put the pieces together about it.
It's a blurry photo of a plant, from an underneath angle, the weird blue-grey background color being the sky. Blew my mind. It also makes the cover vastly more interesting to me, because it's actually something instead of a bunch of weird shapes.
I know that this is probably a super basic realization - plants are a fundamental part of The Fragile's entire iconography, and everything is "photo taken at weird angle and crazy blurry" - but it still is kind of crazy to me that it's a photo of something recognizable.
I had this exact same realization about Still's cover a while ago, but I think that's more justifiable because the doesn't really give you anything to work with unless you're looking at the extended art.