On June 20, 1975, Bruce Springsteen and Clarence Clemons took the elevator to Eric Meola’s studio in Manhattan for a two hour photoshoot. Fifty years have now passed. To celebrate this landmark, Eric has personally selected a number of photographs from that legendary session to offer as signed, numbered limited editions. We will come to those, but first, after so much time, how does Eric look back on this session? Let’s find out, as Eric offers some very personal reflections…

“In thirty years they’re going to write books about this album.” Clarence Clemons looked at me, fifty years ago, then shook his head, and repeated what he had just said. It was June 20, 1975, and he and Bruce Springsteen had spent two hours with me as I photographed them for the cover of the album Born to Run. As prescient as Clarence was, it would take only six years before Dave Marsh’s book Born to Run: The Bruce Springsteen Story, was published. There were no assistants that day, no witnesses, no stylists, or make-up artists. I wanted no distractions, and I needed to be alone. On a turntable, there were just the sounds of Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, and the Rolling Stones’ December’s Children.

I know what I intended to photograph; I had a sense of the history unfolding in front of my camera. Alfred Wertheimer’s photographs of Elvis, as well as those of Daniel Kramer’s photographs of Bob Dylan, were my north star. As I waited in my studio loft on the fourth floor of 134 Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, I could hear the squeaking of the elevator’s cable as Leo, a rambunctious East European elevator operator, pulled down with his rough, gloved hand grasping the ancient cable that went through the top of the elevator’s cabin.

I knew nothing about Douglas Springsteen, Bruce’s father, nor The Castiles, Bruce’s first band. And I knew nothing about the notebooks crammed with lyrics and phrases, and crossed-out words in which a teenage Springsteen had so assiduously kept his thoughts, ambitions, and dreams.  As far as I knew, or thought about, Bruce was an apparition, a gifted musician who had grown up on the Jersey shore, and had his sights on a place where, in his words, “I could walk like Brando, right into the sun.” I simply liked the music, and I would play “New York City Serenade,” and disappear at night in the jazz riffs of David Sancious’ piano, while Bruce’s voice implored us to “shake away the city life, shake away the street life.”

The year before, on a muggy August day, I was standing near the corner of Fifth Avenue and Central Park South in New York when it began to rain. I ran under the overhang of the Plaza Hotel and came face-to-face with Bruce, who was about to do a concert in the park. All I can remember is that I got up the nerve to introduce myself and ask about some of the words on his second album, The Wild, the Innocent and the E Street Shuffle.  Unlike Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., and every Springsteen album since then, there were no lyrics on the jacket sleeve.

Words. It was always the words; the cadence of alliteration bounced off the lyrics:

With my blackjack and jacket and hair slicked sweet

Silver star studs on my duds like a Harley in heat…

-— “It’s So Hard To Be a Saint in the City”

I have no idea how I came to photograph the cover of Born to Run. Somehow, some way, sometime, I was going to photograph Bruce. I wanted to do it; I wanted to do it more than anything I have ever wanted.  Clarence put in a good word, and Bruce’s first manager, Mike Appel, needed a photographer. Given the opportunity I had walked and talked my way into the arena, and the time had come to make good on my word. I was in the proverbial right place and at the right time. It is said of this guy we collectively refer to as “The Boss” that he doesn’t suffer fools; well, I think this was one time that he made an exception. I wanted this for him, not for me. He was quietly zealous, and introspective to a fault, yet as cool as a summer wind, and I wanted to show both sides of someone who had put his soul on the wire for the better part of a year to make eight songs.

There is a famous video of a 15-year-old Australian schoolboy, Nathan Testa, holding up a sign saying “Missed school, can I play ‘Growin’ Up’ with you?”. Bruce calls him up on stage, and a little less than four minutes into the video Bruce explains to Nathan that “I realized it wasn’t how well you played, it was how good you looked doing it.” And that, I had explained to Bruce in 1975, was what I hoped he and Clarence would do. Shooting in my studio had its advantages, and it was a controlled environment; what I didn’t want was a contrived environment. Bruce’s words were in black-and-white, and that’s what I photographed.

Richard Avedon’s photographs informed me of the power, and graceful elegance, of a stark white background: eliminating all distraction, your eye has only one place to go. In two hours of magic, Bruce and Clarence mirrored the emotions and poses they carried on stage each night, and they helped me capture those moments before they left gravity behind. And then, there was the undeniable drama of the fold-out cover that Columbia Records’ art director, John Berg, made into a classic of album cover art.

A few weeks before making these photographs, I took a train down to Long Branch, New Jersey, and rang the bell at 7 1/2 West End Court. Bruce answered, asked if I wanted to hear a new song he had just written, and then sat down at a small Aeolian piano, and played “Meeting Across the River.”  There are not many hours you would trade for your life; for me, this would be one of them. In another month, both Time and Newsweek would do cover stories on Bruce. A few radio stations in Philadelphia were playing copies of the song “Born to Run” that summer. In just a few weeks, that would change forever.

Eric Meola, June 2025.

The limited editions

This 50th anniversary collection consists of eight new limited editions—five as single images, and three multi-image artworks. Each is available in a choice of physical size options. By clicking on the green button under each image you will see prices and sizes for the two standard sizes that Eric is offering as limited editions. Prices start at USD 2,000 / approx GBP 1,500. 

Eric also wanted to offer collectors the chance to acquire pieces in this new collection in very large sizes (outside the standard large size of 24 x 36 inches for a single image) and these are available on a custom basis to suit your specific wall space. For single images, the maximum size is a 60 x 90 inch sheet, but you can choose a custom size up to that maximum. If a custom large size is of interest then once you have identified your specific size requirements just get in touch and we will put together a price for you. The number of custom artworks will be capped at ten across all sizes. 

We anticipate orders will take approximately three weeks for regular sizes and six weeks for custom sizes.

What better way to kick off this 50th anniversary collection with a single piece that combines 25 of Eric’s all-time-favourite images from the shoot, with the classic cover image in the central slot. So here it is. There are two standard sizes, but this is one where an ultra-large size, custom-made for your wallspace could really hit the spot.

Born to Run Telecaster Detail

The guitar that Bruce Springsteen brought to the photo-shoot has a detail that is often overlooked. There is a tiny painting on the leather pickguard. You can see it here, in this tight crop: a street scene on a starry moonlit night. Look closely and you can see someone leaning against a lamppost, lighting a cigarette (or maybe playing a harmonica), while another observes the scene from a tenement window—just like it says in the second verse of ‘Tenth Avenue Freeze-Out’.

We have always loved this little detail, and this photograph celebrates it by making the painting the centre of attention. But actually it is about much more—the tight crop emphasises the centrality of that guitar, held here in Bruce’s iron grip, and the beautifully contrasting textures of the swamp ash body, maple neck, and black leather.

In his classic book Celebrating the Negative, photographer John Loengard examined the intrinsic beauty of film negatives, and the fact that museums reject them, while insurance companies grossly underestimate their value, yet photographers revere them as priceless pieces of stunning beauty. He tracked down some of the world’s most celebrated negatives, from Eisenstaedt to Weston, Adams to Kertesz, and it is startling to see these thin pieces of film held in gloved fingers and know that from them came some of the world’s most celebrated prints.

What would the Born to Run LP cover negative look like if made as a print ? 

Like this. 

The Born to Run cover negative

Tramps Like Us

Over the course of his two hour session with Bruce and Clarence, Eric Meola made space to capture the two friends just goofing around and having fun for the camera. This is a perfect example.

Elvis The King

When the Bruce Springsteen Archives and Center for American Music opens at Monmouth University in 2026, visitors will enter by crossing a walkway inscribed with the date September 9, 1956. This was the date that Bruce Springsteen first saw Elvis, performing on The Ed Sullivan show. At the time Bruce was just shy of his seventh birthday. As he later explained: “Once Elvis came across the airwaves, once he was heard and seen in action, you could not put the genie back in the bottle. After that moment, there was yesterday, and there was today, and there was a red hot, rockabilly forging of a new tomorrow, before your very eyes.”

The Elvis fan club badge that Bruce brought to the shoot features prominently on both his guitar strap and, as here, on his jacket.

Bruce With Guitar

The story is well-known. In 1973 Bruce Springsteen bought a guitar, finally retiring it over forty years later. Bruce talks about buying it (for 185 dollars) on—coincidentally—page 185 of his autobiography Born to Run:

“I strapped on my new guitar, a 1950s mutt with a Telecaster body and an Esquire neck, I’d purchased at Phil Petillo’s Belmar guitar shop for one hundred and eighty-five dollars. With its wood body worn in like the piece of the cross it was, it became the guitar I’d play for the next forty years. It was the best deal of my life.”

Two years later, that was the guitar that Bruce brought with him to Eric’s studio. When he sings those famous lines in ‘Thunder Road’, this is the guitar he is talking about.