The story behind the photo that inspired Frank Ocean’s Blond When you think about Frank Ocean’s Blond album, you probably imagine the Wolfgang Tillmans lensed photo of the singer stood a bathroom, face covered with bandaged hand and his hair dyed green. It’s an iconic image and one that says a lot about the album. Beyond this picture though is another image that started it all. In 2014, Ocean came across an image of a young blonde girl sat in the backseat of a car. Ocean spoke about how the image influenced him and the recording of Blond in Boys Don’t Cry zine where the picture was featured. The mag opens with a personal letter explaining how @jessicaandclark photo inspired him. “Two years ago I found an image of a kid with her hands covering her face. A seatbelt reached across her torso, riding up her neck and a mop of blonde hair stayed swept, for the moment, behind her ears,” Ocean writes. He goes on to picture himself in the girl’s position, feeling claustrophobic because of the seatbelt, and wiggling back and forth to free himself. This sense of freeing manifests in many of the albums songs and themes: freeing himself from societal expectations of being a man, freeing himself from heartbreak and freeing himself from a record label. Speaking on the image, Jessica Haye and Clark Hsiao of the LA-based studio Collaborationist explain how the image came to be. “We made this photograph on a road trip to Death Valley for a celebration of life for our friend, Natasha, who died of cancer. A small group of her family and friends traveled to the desert to honor her in one of her favorite natural places. One of her two children, who is close friends with our daughter, rode with us. We think this is a strong image on its own merit, but it occupies a special place for us because of the importance of the relationship we have with its subject, and the poignancy of that particular time.” The duo explain that the subject of the photo @infinnatejoy, who now identifies as a trans man, was able to see it both online and in person in one of the out of home placements the label did promoting the album, and perhaps was able to have a parallel experience of recollections