Nevermind Cover — Rose Bowl Aquatic Center, Pasadena, California

The iconic cover photograph of Nirvana's 1991 album "Nevermind" — an infant swimming naked toward a dollar bill on a fishhook — was shot by photographer Kirk Weddle at the Rose Bowl Aquatic Center in Pasadena, California. The baby was four-month-old Spencer Elden, the son of a friend of Weddle's. The image, conceived by Kurt Cobain and art director Robert Fisher, was intended to comment on consumerism and the corruption of innocence — a child drawn instinctively toward money, unaware of the hook. The shoot reportedly took several takes across different infants before Spencer Elden's session produced the usable result.

"Nevermind" was released on September 24, 1991, and within months had displaced Michael Jackson's "Dangerous" from the top of the Billboard charts — an event that announced the arrival of alternative rock as the dominant commercial form of American popular music. The album's singles — "Smells Like Teen Spirit," "Come as You Are," "Lithium," "Polly" — were played on mainstream radio and MTV at a volume that changed the music industry's commercial calculus overnight. It has sold over thirty million copies worldwide and is consistently ranked among the most important albums in rock history.

The Rose Bowl Aquatic Center continues to operate as a public swimming facility adjacent to the Rose Bowl stadium in Pasadena. Spencer Elden, who grew up aware of his role in one of the most famous images in music history, has had a complicated public relationship with the photograph across his adult life, at various points embracing and challenging it legally. The pool itself is a functional municipal facility whose unremarkable appearance makes it all the more striking as the origin point of one of rock's defining images.