Don Bronstein

Don Bronstein is credited with designing and photographing over 500 album covers for Chess Records and its subsidiaries: Checker, Argo, Verve, and Cadet, as well as Mercury, Columbia, and Universal. Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry, Sammy Davis Jr., Etta James, Howlin Wolf, Bo Didley, and Little Walter, to name a few. In 1963, Bronstein photographed a young Barbra Streisand looking out as the sun rose over Lake Michigan. The photograph was used on the cover of her PEOPLE album and was awarded a Grammy for the best album cover. As Playboy’s first photographer, he created covers and centerfolds in the 1950s and ‘60s, establishing the look and feel of a centerfold, and traveled the world to discover subjects and inspiration all over the world. Bronstein died in 1968, at the age of 41, in Mexico on assignment for the magazine