Deftones‘ seminal album Around the Fur features some of the most iconic artwork of the ’90s — a provocative image of a young woman in a jacuzzi, shot from a bizarre top-down, up-close perspective with a fisheye lens.
In a new video feature, Jenkem magazine set out to uncover the lore behind the sleeve image and its bikini-clad subject, Lisa Hughes, going as far as to track down the present-day Hughes, as well as catch up with the photographer behind the shot, Rick Kosick.
As Kosick recalls in the clip, he was invited to shoot photos during the recording of Around the Fur in Seattle. There was no pressure to produce an album cover shot, only “go there and have fun, hang out, shoot photos.”
“They were kind of in their party phase stage of the band — as you probably should be — and so we went back to their their condo that they rented during the recording of this record, and there was this girl hanging out in the jacuzzi,” Kosick said (as transcribed by The PRP). “And I just went up and took a couple… two photos. That’s it. Walked away.”
He continued: “Few weeks later, I get a call from the label. ‘Hey, come by and check this out. We want to show you something.’ And the art director [Kevin Reagan], he was like, ‘Well, what do you think?’ I was like, ‘Wow.’ I was blown away. I was like, ‘This is so cool looking. This looks… I love it’ — of course, I’m going to say I love it. It’s my photo — but I was just really… looking back, I was just really excited because it felt right after all the mockups and everything, this one looks incredible.”
Hughes also said she had no intentions of cover art fame and cleared up any misconceptions surrounding the photo, i.e. that she was a groupie.
“I found those articles, you know, about like [me allegedly] being a groupie and this and that,” Hughes said. “And I was like, maybe I should just start a little page just about myself and so people know that I’m Lisa. I’m just this awesome chick from Auburn, and I like to have fun. And there’s no groupie action going on here. Just me having a kick-ass time, you know?”
Regarding Kosick’s iconic image, she added: “It’s a pretty cool looking shot, right? Like with the fisheye lens just looking down. You know, it’s kind of risqué a little bit with my breasts, and people have asked, ‘Oh, look, you got a pimple there.’ I’m like, ‘Who gives a sh*t?’ What does that really matter?’ I’m a human being. I’m not a model and I could care less really. That’s me. It’s just cool looking. And if you look at the whole shot and the legs going into the hot tub, it just looks pretty awesome.”
Hughes said she now signs copies of the album for her daughters’ friends. Meanwhile, frontman Chino Moreno reflected on the enduring popularity of the album and cover art in a 2025 interview with the “Broken Record Podcast.”
“And that photo was just from a random night there, whatever,” Moreno said. “And it got mixed in with all the other photos from the thing. So when they came and [started] spreading all the photos out for the album cover, that picture was there. And it was literally just like everybody pointed at that one. I mean, it’s very ’90s too. So ’90s. So it like really represents that time. It’s kind of funny.”
As for Hughes, Moreno said she was merely “a friend who we befriended while we were there in Seattle.”
“And I did see a thing the other day, it was cool, they showed like, you know, her then and now,” he said. “So it was her like, now — she’s probably our age now too, like, you know, maybe late 40s, early 50s — and she’s holding up the album cover, and she’s, like, smiling, whatever. ‘This is me,’ you know when she was young as well.”
Chino added: “But who knew, right? It’s like even when she was asked, ‘Hey, we want to use this for the album cover.’ But then thinking that, like, 30 something years later, whatever it is, that would be such an iconic photo with t-shirts and all these like teenagers now wearing that picture on their t-shirt.”
Watch the full YouTube clip about the Around the Fur album cover below.
