Posts from the “Photography” Category

My Man, Nat Finkelstein 1933–2009, May He Rest in Peace

Posted on October 7, 2009

Lemme tell you about my man Nat Finkelstein the kinkiest kid Brooklyn has ever seen. I met him in 2000, he called the office one day to talk with the bosses about his new book for Fall, a Warhol book about the Factory’s earliest days, when the original King of Pop still made his own paintings. Days of desultory decadence that Nat cuts to shreds in his book, The Factory Years, which is now out of print. He signed my book: Heed the cry of the mutant “I need others like me”.

Indeed.

Born in Coney Island, Brooklyn in 1933, Nat Finkelstein was a graduate of Stuyvesant High School and attended Brooklyn College. He blew me away when he dropped this gem on me: homeboy studied photography and design under Alexey Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar. What was this crazy BK boy up to anyway ? How did he connect with Warhol ?

Turns out Nat worked as a photojournalist for the PIX and Black Star photo agencies. In 1964, he got an assignment to enter Andy Warhol’s Factory as a journalist. He didn’t leave for three years. Not until he left his mark, with the first photos of the Velvet Underground, who he called “The Psychopath’s Rolling Stones,” then with shots of Edie Sedgwick, and then finally for being the dude who introduced Valerie Solanis to Andy Warhol. A big mark indeed.

Finkelstein abruptly retired from photography in 1969, when a federal warrant was issued for his arrest, due to the incendiary nature of his civil rights activity. He left the United States, and lived as a fugitive for fifteen years, following the Silk Road through the Middle East. I’ve read some of the stories: Morocco in the late 60s, Kandahar in 71; the sort of things you’d never believe, except Nat had proof. He had his photos.

Eventually, all charges against Finkelstein were dismissed, and he returned to New York City in 1982, resuming his photographic career in galleries worldwide. While best known for his images of Warhol’s Factory, Finkelstein’s documented stories as wide ranging as civil rights protests for Life Magazine in the 1960s to the “club kid” scene of the 1990s. His monographs include The Andy Warhol Index (with Warhol, 1968), Girlfriends (1991), Merry Monsters (1993), Andy Warhol: The Factory Years (2000) and Edie Factory Girl (2006).

Flickr

Finkelstein’s photographs are in the permanent collection of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Andy Warhol Museum, Pittsburgh; The Victoria & Albert Museum, London; The Ludwig Museum, Cologne; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; and the Smithsonian Institute, National Portrait Gallery, Washington DC, among many other public and private collections. His work can be seen in upcoming exhibitions, including “Who Shot Rock” at the Brooklyn Museum this Fall, and a retrospective at Idea Generation, London in December 2009.

Nat Finkelstein passed peacefully at his home in Upstate New York on Friday October 2, 2009. He was 76. Rest in Peace, Nat. You were a true original. A rebel and a renegade, an artist and a ladies man, a brilliant thinker, a crazed Tasmanian devil, and one of the funniest, most on-point people I have ever had the pleasure to know. And I am so glad you had the good sense to marry Elizabeth, as she will carry the torch and torch the flag. Whatever it takes to make things happen.

Artnet

Categories: 1960s, 1970s, 1980s, 1990s, Photography

Godlis Shot Debbie Harry and Patti Smith

Posted on September 1, 2009

Godlis – Blondie

Godlis began photographing at CBGB’s in 1976. As a refugee of the New York City street photography scene, his work reveals an infatuation with Leica cameras, long handheld exposures, and Brassai’s classic night photographs of the 1930s. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, in the landmark 1981 show “New Wave/New York: at P.S.1, New Museum of Contemporary Art, CBGB 313 Gallery, and Pace MacGill Gallery, all in New York; and at Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie, Arles.

Godlis discusses his work, Blondie, CBGB’s, New York City, 1977, and Patti Smith Outside CBGB’s, Bowery and Bleecker Street, New York City, 1976, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

What lead you to study photography at Imageworks and what were your aspirations when you first entered the discipline?

Godlis: Well, seeing Antonioni’s “Blow Up” was probably pretty key to me getting interested in photography. David Hemmings as David Bailey in his darkroom in swinging London, with the club appearance by the Yardbirds—not to mention Vanessa Redgrave and Jane Birkin; that made photography look pretty cool.

I got my first camera at the end of the summer of 1970. I was living in Boston and immediately began shooting black & white pictures of all my friends. I became fascinated by the cult of the camera itself. I started educating myself by picking up old Photography Annuals and hanging out looking at photo books at the library. I was clearly obsessed with what this “photography” thing was, so I took a basic course in 1972 to actually get inside a darkroom.

Right around that time, I took a trip to NYC to the Museum of Modern Art, where I was stunned by the Diane Arbus 1972 exhibition. For me that was a defining moment, where my fascination with photography crossed paths with the rock aesthetic I had grown up around. Bob Dylan’s “Ballad of a Thin Man” was cut from the same cloth as Diane Arbus’ “Jewish Giant with Parents.” So that exhibition, along with the first time I saw Cartier-Bresson’s “Decisive Moment” was the turning point for me.

After that I needed a place to really learn how to learn about the art of photography. Imageworks was where I landed in the fall of 1974. Imageworks was in East Cambridge, Massachusetts. It was the kind of experimental photography school that really flourished in the early 70s—an art school devoted totally to photography—where a group of like-minded kids with cameras showed up to pick up skills and share ideas. Teachers came in from RISD in Providence and SVA in NYC. My first class, my first day—Nan Goldin and Stanley Greene were both beginner photographers in that class—was like jumping into a cold pool. It was all photography all the time, and I couldn’t get enough of it.

Imageworks was where that I began to learn how to really look at photographs—Robert Frank, Walker Evans, Lee Friedlander, Garry Winogrand, Brassai, Kertesz, Atget, Weegee. My greatest teacher was Paul Krot from RISD, who invented the Sprint chemicals I still use. He cut through all the crap and made it very clear what was important to know. And there really was a cult of straight “street photography” at Imageworks. That’s what really interested me, and that’s how I saw myself, in that pre-Post Modern era: the lonely street photographer with camera conquering the world.

I hung around Imageworks until it imploded and shut down during the recession of 1975, and then packed up my gear and headed to NYC to shoot on the streets of New York and look for work as an assistant.

NYC, 1976, Abbie Hoffman’s old St. Marks Place apartment!! It couldn’t be more fitting. Gail quotes you as saying, “I wasn’t a rock photographer. I photographed a scene.” What attracted you to the East Village in 1976, and to its underground HQ, CBGB’s?

When I got to NYC in 1976, I was looking for work as a photographer’s assistant to pay the bills. Eventually I landed a steady job, and looked for a place to hang out and hear music. There weren’t very many clubs that didn’t have cover bands, and I’d seen that picture of Patti Smith and Bob Dylan that kind of tipped me off to CBGB’s, so I went in there to see what was going on. I had also seen copies of Punk magazine and Rock Scene at a newsstand at Penn Station. The first time I went to CBGB’s I saw Television and figured out pretty quickly that there were some like-minded Velvet Underground fans in this place. I had found my new hangout. It didn’t hurt that I got in for free.

But I didn’t really go there to photograph, I went there to hear music and meet people. It was late one night at the bar that I had this epiphany that maybe I should be photographing the place. If I could photograph it at night under natural light exactly the way it looked—I had been looking at Brassai’s night pictures of Paris in the 1930s at the time—that would be something no one else was doing. And if I didn’t do it who would? I didn’t want to be a rock photographer. I didn’t want to be Annie Liebowitz. I wanted to be Brassai!

As far as St. Marks Place goes, I used to go down there in the 60s when I was a teenager and always loved the block so it wasn’t that far fetched to go looking for an apartment there. It was close to the Bowery and CBGB’s where I was spending all my time, and the rent was cheap. Roberta Bayley lived upstairs in the same building, so we could share darkroom chemicals. What I didn’t expect was that I would end up in Abbie Hoffman’s old apartment. I found that out years later, when we went on rent strike and one of my neighbors told me that Abbie had gone underground from there. It’s always felt like a lot of history passed through that place.

Your epiphany, to photograph New York at night, and to explore the issues of film, paper, and exposure, are what set apart your work from so many others. Your work with light at night is exciting, can you speak about the different challenges you faces with the conditions of the street and nightclub environments?

I was committed to shooting by natural light at night—no flash—so I was already painting myself into a corner. But it was my corner and no one else’s. If you use a flash, it’s like turning a light on in a room that’s already lit a certain way and I definitely didn’t want to do that. But I made it work for me. I wanted my pictures to look exactly the way things looked at CBGB’s, at that time and place.

I was already shooting with a Leica camera, which I could hold steady at slow shutter speeds. But the problem was determining the right combination of shutter speeds, f/stop, and film developing. That took weeks of testing. I was like a mad scientist in the darkroom, trying variations of mixing chemicals to push the Tri-x film until I got enough on the negative to make a good print. Then testing out papers to come up with the right look. It really paid off, in that it gave my pictures a unique look. I didn’t even know what they would look like until I figured it all out. But once I figured it out, I was free to shoot at night indoors, onstage and off, and outdoors with people lit up by the Bowery streetlights.

I had to shoot at ¼-second exposure handheld, so I had to remind people—drunk people—to hold still. But that worked to my benefit too. What was great was that the prints glowed. They looked great at night, when I showed them to people in the club. The darkroom light was the same as the club lighting. The magazines in America thought they were blurry grainy shots because they didn’t look like flash photos but in England and France they loved them.

Now for the people who were there in 1976-79, they tell me the pictures look exactly like what they remember of CBGB’s. And for people who weren’t there, the pictures show them what it would have been like to be there. That was what I wanted to do—to show what the present will look like as the past. That’s the essence of my type of photography.

How did the people on the scene connect to the work you were doing?

I used to go down to CBGB’s every night with a box of pictures to show people what I was doing. Inevitably I left with fewer pictures than I showed up with—I gave many away. But over time, everyone in the club knew what I was doing and wanted to be part of it. There were no digital backs on the cameras back then. So you had to develop and print the work yourself every day.

The way the pictures were printed made them look especially good under the club lighting. I remember Bob Gruen telling me one night—I was so impressed that this was the actual Bob Gruen—that he used to do the same thing, bringing pictures down to clubs and showing them to everyone when he started out. That meant a lot to me, and everyone’s reaction at CBGB’s spurred me on.

Handsome Dick Manitoba’s finding my stolen wallet and returning it to me at CBGB’s one night in 1976 led me to do that picture of him and his girlfriend Jody in front of CB’s to return the favor. Television called me to do their photograph for the second album, which led to the pictures of Richard Lloyd at in the hospital. Tapping Patti Smith on the shoulder one night outside CBGB’s and asking to take her photograph lit up by the Bowery streetlamps led to one of my most memorable photographs. I remember talking with Alex Chilton in 1977 and being totally impressed by his stories of photographer William Eggleston, whom he’d known in Memphis—which led to us doing the photograph of him where a drop of rain magically landed on the lens. We really all worked off of each other every night at CBGB’s—just like the bands worked off of their audiences.

I love your little story about Robert Frank, could you retell it here?

Well I was such a big fan of Robert Frank since my time at Imageworks and so much of what I was doing at CBGB’s was influenced, both consciously and unconsciously, by him. I knew The Americans and Lines of My Hand inside out. His photograph of the kids with the jukebox from The Americans, I wanted to make that photograph inside CBGB’s. I had seen him speak in 1975 at Wellesley College right after Walker Evans had died, when he showed a reel of the banned Rolling Stones film.

But now here I was shooting at CBGB’s in 1977 and in walks Robert Frank, right past the front desk. I was stunned. I was the only one there who recognized him. But to me, one of my biggest influences had just walked into the place, where I was shooting pictures totally influenced by him. At that time I didn’t have any idea that he lived around the corner on Bleecker Street! I remember he asked me what was going on here, and he said in his Swiss accent, “It looks like de way people dress here is very important.”

Then everyone around me wanted to know who is this guy. I said incredulously, “That’s Robert Frank!” Well no one knew who that was. So I said, “Robert Frank, The Americans?” No reaction. “Cocksucker Blues”? Still no reaction. Then “Exile on Main Street?” Well that was a pretty influential album on the punk scene in 77, so when I said he did the cover for that album, it clicked and people said, “Oh yeah—he’s very cool! What’s his name?”

Godlis – Debbie Harry

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Chris Stein Shot Richard Hell and Debbie Harry

Posted on August 31, 2009

Chris Stein – The Legend of Nick Detroit

Chris Stein, guitarist and songwriter, was born in Brooklyn. In the early 70s, Stein joined the glam-rock group the Stilettos, which featured Deborah Harry as its lead singer. After the Stilettos fell apart, Stein and Harry formed the hugely popular and successful punk/New Wave band Blondie. Stein wrote the hit song “Sunday Girl,” and co-wrote, with his onetime-girlfriend Harry, Blondie hit songs including “Heart of Glass,” “Dreaming,” “Rapture,” “Picture This,” “Rip Her to Shreds,” and “Island of Lost Souls.” He ran the label Animal Records from 1982 to 1984, and also did the album cover for “Exposure,” Robert Fripp’s solo album, the first record cover done will all color Xeroxes. Stein not only composed the scores for the films “Union City” and “Pie in the Sky: The Brigid Berlin Story,” but also was a co-composer on the scores for the movie “Wild Style” and the TV special “When Disco Ruled the World.” In the late 90s Chris and Harry relaunched Blondie; since then the group has recorded two albums and continues to perform in concert all over the world. Stein, also a longtime photographer, has done album artwork for Lydia Lunch and Dramarama.

Stein discusses his works collaborations with John Holmstrom for PUNK magazine, Richard Hell and Debbie Harry, Seventeenth Street, New York City, “The Legend of Nick Detroit,” and Anya Phillips and Debbie Harry,” selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

You are a musician as well as a photographer, which gives you a unique insight into the relationship between photography and music. How do you feel the image impacts the listener’s understanding of the music?

Chris Stein: I have never figured out or decided if image was a plus or a minus when it comes to defining one’s musical style. I often say in interviews that when I was a teenager “most of my heroes were 60 year old black men.” This of course is a reference to trends that embrace only youth and fancy fashion as the mark of success. Recently much was made of the dowdy matron who appeared on some TV talent show and was endowed with a terrific singing voice. But there the context was all about her unattractiveness, which then became her selling point thereby negating the whole argument. Very weird!

Your photographs in Who Shot Rock & Roll feature the distinctive graphics of John Holmstrom. They are unlike any other image in the book, as they show your willingness to collaborate with yet another artist in the creation of the image. How did you come to create these images—clearly they were staged, but did you have the end product in mind when you set out to shoot, or was this something that came about through the process of creation itself?

Going into the various PUNK magazine projects with John, I was already familiar with the form: that of the Fumetti, a photo story that was laid out like a comic strip, often with speech balloons for the characters. Fumettis began, I think, in the early 60s and are currently more popular in Latin America and Europe than in the U.S. John Holmstrom was a source of many terrific ideas and working with a large number of our peers from the rock scene in NYC was great fun! In many of the photos I left room for the speech balloons when composing the shot.

What advantages do you see in shooting your own band and artistic coterie instead of having someone from the outside doing it?

Just the familiarity between us makes it easier to shoot candid moments.

In the days before the Internet and digital photography, when content was seemingly limited to those with access, the creation of images played a massive role in the music. How does your work contribute to this archive?

Because Debbie was so photogenic and appealing in pictures it was easy to disseminate shots of her to the media early on. Many people saw her image before hearing the bands music. During the 70s in the UK the weekly national music press didn’t have an equivalent in the U.S. and because of this many bands were visually available to British music fans prior to those bands music being heard or played on radio. This phenomenon certainly contributed to the popularity of “punk,” which relied heavily on elements of fashion to define itself.

Chris Stein – Staten Island Ferry

Categories: Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Manhattan, Music, Photography

Albert Watson Shot Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson

Posted on August 26, 2009

Albert Watson. Mick Jagger, Los Angeles, California, 1992.

Albert Watson, born in Scotland, is the author of eight books, including his first monograph titled Cyclops, a reference to the fact that the artist was born with only one functioning eye. The recipient of a 1975 Grammy Award for the photography on the cover of Mason Profitt’s album, “Come and Gone,” Watson’s career in photography goes beyond music, to include fashion, advertising editorial, movie posters, still life, landscape, portraiture, and photo documentary projects. The recipient of three ANDY Awards and the Lucie Award for Advertising Photography, Watson has shot over 250 covers for Vogue, directed more than 600 TV commercials, and exhibited his work around the globe.

Watson discussed his work, Mick Jagger, Los Angeles, California, 1992; Michael Jackson, New York City, 1999; and LL Cool J, 1992, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

I think it is really fascinating that Gail Buckland has decided to look at rock photography as a subject that is worthy of contemplation not just for our enjoyment but as an art form. What role do you think the image plays in communicating music and its energy?

Albert Watson: I think very often it gives you a visual connection. Nowadays it is magazines; in the past it would be album covers, which were 12 x 12 inches; then it became CDs so they became a few inches by a few inches; and then they all disappeared as an art form. So very often albums were a big kind of transmitter of the image of the person. If you think about all the Beatles albums you have this very close visual connection to the music. When you listen to the music you have an image of the person and their performance.

How did you come to get into photographing musicians?

I actually photograph a lot of different things. I have a great love for photography but I never really settled down into one genre. In a lot of the work that I did there was this driving force of loving photography and therefore I had no hesitations that if I felt like photographing landscapes to photograph landscapes. If I felt like doing still life work, then I enjoy doing still life work. If there are beautiful women I photograph beautiful women.

I got the chance to do a celebrity portrait and it turned out to be Alfred Hitchcock. It was quite shocking in a way, but I enjoyed that. I enjoy celebrity but I could never do what Annie Leibovitz does because her concentration is for the most part celebrity. She is a celebrity photojournalist, a very good one. I was for example very happy to do an entire book on Morocco, which were just local people with no celebrities apart from the king. I have moved to a lot of different genres in photography.

How do I get to rock musicians? It was a natural progression of photographing celebrity. They form a chunk of the celebrity group along with actors. I have done a lot of movie posters as well as musicians.

Do you have a personal connection with the people you photograph? When I am look at the work that Gail had chosen: LL Cool J, Mick Jagger, and Michael Jackson, the intensity of the image leads me as the viewer to believe there is something more…

The answer to that is no, because I would have the same connection with Mick Jagger as I would have with a porter in a market in the middle of the mountains of Morocco. I am giving the same attention, the same respect and the same love doing the portrait to both Mick Jagger and the porter or a plumber, it doesn’t make any difference in that way.

There is obviously more stress associated with a celebrity. The stress level will always be higher than with the porter from the mountains. Obviously someone like Mick Jagger or Michael Jackson is a lot more familiar with the process, while a man on the street is not. In the end the connection thing between the photographer and the subject is the key thing whether it is the Queen of England, the President of the United States or a blues singer, or Mick Jagger or somebody who is just walking down the street. If you are doing a real portrait, you want to connect with that person. There are just different ways to approach it but the connection should be the same.

As you talk about connections, the image I was most struck by was the Michael Jackson, in part because you really created his energy in still photo and also, when I started to really look at it, I thought it was possibly one of the most flattering images I had ever seen of him because there was nothing of his strangeness in it. You went completely past that and you saw the artist…

Yes, and strangely enough none of that was retouched. It would have been a big retouching job because there are just simply hundreds of images of him there. In the end he was another person I had to connect with, because Michael is actually very shy. I think in his nature and in his DNA he is actually a very introverted and shy person. And you ask yourself, how can somebody that shy and that introverted be that explosive? There are a lot of actors that are very shy, yet they have no trouble going out onto a stage every night and exploding on a stage as an actor. I think Michael was a little bit like that. A lot of these people have good sense of looking at you. They look at you and they say, “Ok, this guy knows what he is doing.” I think the organizational thing is part of the connection.

Let’s go back to what you said about how you shoot so many different genres of photography and how the love of photography brought you to all these different ways of looking at the world. What I think is interesting about what Gail is doing with the book, a lot of the attention is to sort of allow people to look at rock photography as equal to other forms of photography but it hasn’t received its due. I want to ask you, because you work in all these different genres, do you see a difference?

Very often there is journey that a photograph takes. Sometimes the fine art photographers out there, they wake up in the morning and their idea is to create an image that will immediately go from their head, through a camera, onto a print, onto a wall. That is what the intention is. It is a piece of fine art, so concept of it is that it is created for a wall.

Very often photographers say that rock photography is made for an album cover, a CD cover, Internet usage, magazine covers, magazine interior, t-shirt usage and so on. In a lot of rock photography a photograph can begin its journey as a magazine shot or a CD cover, or a CD interior. The Michael Jackson was done for the inside as a fold out. A photograph can look fantastically good in a magazine the photographer will say, because everybody loves this shot, I will put it in my next book, a hardcover coffee table book. A book opens and closes.

When you have an apartment, or a house or a gallery or a museum, essentially it goes up on the wall and it doesn’t go away, it stays there. It may only stay there for a week or a month or for a year or two or it may be sold and go on somebody else’s wall. Consequently, this journey from that image stops whether or not it holds the wall or not.

Because of my training I might have had some advantage over some photographers because essentially I was trained heavily in art college in modern photography. If you look at lot of my work, I was trained as a graphic designer, I was trained in art, painting, drawing, and then eventually I went to film school. But if you look at all the work that I do it really comes down to either a cinematic story or to graphic design. Sometimes it is a combination of the two. I would say, that every so often my work looks better on the wall than it does in a magazine. Because of the different functions of all the different shots, a photograph makes it all the way through the journey by chance.

A shot of Mick Jagger will hold up for this exhibition, but will it also hold up for an exhibition that is not rock photography? That is the real test. The question is: Is it art or not?

Albert Watson – Michael Jackson

Categories: Art, Music, Photography

Kate Simon Shot Bunny Wailer

Posted on August 25, 2009

kate simon – Bunny Wailer

Kate Simon was born and raised in upstate New York. Her father, medical doctor and amateur photographer, introduced her early on to photography. In the late 1970s Simon photographed the pioneers in Reggae Music including Bob Marley, Lee “Scratch” Perry , Bunny Wailer, Peter Tosh, Burning Spear, and many more. She took some of the most amazing documentary photographs of Bob Marley and the Wailers during various tours and day-to-day life. Simon’s shots are occasionally candid, catching her subjects in intensely personal moments. She has captured photographs of almost every occasion in Bob Marley’s life including celebrations, shock, football games, his funeral and more. She can name claim to the most famous portrait of Bob Marley ever taken, the front cover of the “Kaya” album. Her photos of the 1977 Exodus tour are perhaps the most astonishing of all and are a tour de force in documentary photography.

Simon discusses her work, Bunny Wailer, Kingston, Jamaica, 1976, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

In the book, Gail quotes you as saying, “You can’t make a picture happen. [the person has to] give it to you and you have to be ready for it.” I would love if you could talk about that shoot with Bunny Wailer, about your experience, about who you are and who he is, and how your collaboration made that image possible.

Kate Simon: Well that is a damn good question. Certainly a picture of its time, it was shot in 1976. First of all it is certainly that Bunny Wailer had just put out one the absolute hallmark corner stone record of Roots Rock Reggae called “Blackheart Man.” Bunny Wailer was one of the original Wailers with Peter Tosh and Bob Marley. His singing and his falsetto and his heart, it was just an unbelievable voice. It’s nothing like what his face in that photograph would suggest because it is really soft and just angelic. You can really hear it in “Reincarnated Souls,” “Hallelujah Time,” and “Pass It On” and in the other really well known Wailer songs.

I was living in England at the time as a photographer for one of the weeklies in the music business. Chris Blackwell, the founder of Island Records, sent me down to Jamaica. I got there as the sole photographer and there were two journalists and all three of us were waiting for Bunny to come down from the hills, because he lived in Bull Bay, about nine miles outside Kingston and we waited at Tommy Cowan’s yard. Tommy Cowan was literally the Bill Graham of Jamaican Roots Rock Reggae circuit 1976. He had this office where Jacob Miller, Gregory Isaacs, Peter Tosh, Robbie Shakespeare—everyone that created this genre of music hung out.

I had to wait for Bunny for a week. I waited and when he got there I was ready and I would say so was he. This whole week that we were waiting he was thinking about what he wanted to project to us journalists who were waiting for him. Bunny finally did come with the intention to give me photographs. He was really pitching these really intense images my way. What a face, what intelligence, what fire beneath. He was really clear in regard to who he was and who he was going to give to me. It was not a game face though; it felt very authentic. The only thing that I would say that was to my credit is that I was not intimidated. I will never forget it. It was to this day one of my favorite sessions.

Most of the people that lived then are dead now: Peter Tosh, Dennis Brown, Jacob Miller, Augustus Pablo, Bob Marley, the fathers of this genre of music. Bunny Wailer is extremely alive right now, and he was alive then. I am so grateful to him. It was a really effective exchange. He could tell I was getting it and that is why he gave me some more. Every shot was good and every picture was good. One shot builds to the next shot, and with the energy you know when it is working. The subject knows when it is working and you know when it is working. It is hard work for both, but it is great. You are in the zone.

I want to talk to you about what Gail is doing with the book. Her idea is to move past the genre of rock photography. One of the things that I got really into when talking with her about it, was the idea that with music and photography that there is actually a place where the two meet. The image is so essential to our understanding of music. You as a photographer become a contributor, a collaborator in the experience of the music.

Arguably, a lot of us photographers who are drawn to shoot these musicians have their own kind of rhythmic sense. Don’t you think there is a rhythm to communication, don’t you think a stranger picks up. As a photographer it is your job to make a stranger trust you, respect you and like you, I mean instantaneously. You are throwing your own rhythm to the subject and then they are responding to it, it is utterly rhythmic and it is energetic and it is an exchange of energy. Being sensitive and appreciative of the music makes you be able to approach them.

You shot Bob Marley’s album cover. This is before the Internet and before CDs. One part of a record before the 80s was not just the packaging of it but the communication of their message.

I can remember the person who showed me the “Are You Experienced” album cover, delivering it like it was the tablets of Moses. The famous cover that you are referring to is “Kaya” after which they started to use my pictures on other albums. As an artist it feels great to me, Bob Marley was the unbelievable photo subject because he was completely respectful of photography as a vocation, he understood that it was real work. He really let me know that I was welcome whenever he was around. That was just so freeing and so helpful. It was significant to me in regard to my growth as a photographer because I tried all these new ways of shooting and new kinds of film because this subject Bob Marley so inspired me and I knew that he would not stop me, I knew that he would be with me and encourage me. He was a sent-from-heaven subject. He was just like you would imagine: a very conscious, empathetic, spiritual, really positive person. I think it is a gift from God to be identified with a person that I think so highly of, so many years later.

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Robert Bayley Shot The Ramones & The Heartbreakers

Posted on August 20, 2009

Roberta Bayley – Heartbreakers

Roberta Bayley reigns supreme as one of the principal photographers who served as a significant visual chronicler of the punk rock music movement that lasted from the mid-70s up until the early-80s. Bayley worked as a door person at the legendary CBGB’s where she befriended the scene’s most significant figures. Among the punk music artists she has photographed are Iggy Pop, Blondie, Richard Hell, Elvis Costello, The Sex Pistols, Johnny Thunders and The Heartbreakers, Joe Strummer, The Ramones, Nick Lowe, The Damned, The Clash, The Dead Boys, and The New York Dolls. The chief photographer for Punk magazine, Bayley’s photographs have appeared in countless publications including Blank Generation Revisited: The Early Days of Punk, Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, and CBGB and OMFUG: Thirty Years from the Home of Underground Punk, among others. Bayley co-wrote the book Patti Smith: An Unauthorized Biography with Victor Bockris, and is author of Blondie: Unseen 1976–1980. Her photographs have been exhibited in such major cities as New York, Los Angeles, Sydney, Austin, Paris, Portland, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Hong Kong, London, Mexico City, and Pittsburgh.

Bayley discusses her work, The Heartbreakers, 1975, and The Ramones, New York City, 1976, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

The images Gail selected for the book, The Heartbreakers and The Ramones, are among the most iconic images of punk. Your personal history, working at CBGB’s and photographing the artists (your friends) at the dawn of their careers, put you at the eye of the hurricane (a position I, and many others I am quite sure, look at with envy and awe). Your work is as essential to the scene as the music itself. What did these pictures mean to you when you made them, and has that meaning changed over time, as the photographs have grown into icons?

Roberta Bayley: I made the Ramones image for a shoot for Punk magazine. It was never meant to be the album cover, so there was no pressure on me. John Holmstrom and Legs McNeil were there and we knew the Ramones so it wasn’t a high stress session. The Ramones record company, SIRE, had already hired a “professional” photographer to shoot the album cover but the band hated the photos and were desperate enough to call me! I was paid $125 for that image and one other to be used for publicity—take it or leave it. I took it. As soon as it was released I knew somehow that it was iconic. Over the years many people, especially in England, told me they were “gobsmacked” seeing the cover, and bought the record just because of that image. There has never been another image of the Ramones that captures that particular perfect moment.

The Heartbreakers “blood” photo is completely different in it’s origin than the Ramones image. This image was taken from a session that was (literally) the fourth roll of film through my camera! It was taken in my then-unfurnished, brand new apartment on St. Marks Place (where I still live). The blood concept was Richard Hell’s, taken from the product used to simulate blood in 50s B-movies (it was actually Hershey’s syrup). The photo was used for a New Year’s Eve poster with the phrase “Catch Them While They’re Still Alive”—playing on the band’s reputation as heavy drug users.

The Heartbreakers image did not become “iconic” until it was used for the cover of Please Kill Me in 1996. That book was issued in England, France, Germany, Japan, and Finland, and is still in print. So the image has become associated with that classic book about punk.

I have always loved the dirty glamour, casual formality, and inescapable individuality your subjects exude. As much as these two images were photo shoots for the bands, there’s nothing contrived about these images. Whether it’s Joey Ramone’s smirk or Johnny Thunder’s bravado, the images feel like they are playing to you, connecting to you, rather than to the camera. What was the energy on these shoots, and how did your personal relationships affect your connection to them?

The people I photographed back then were people I knew, and had known, for a few years. Most of them (all of them?) were not experienced in front of the camera, nor was I experienced behind the camera. We were all winging it. I had a natural talent for relaxing my subjects. Also I worked quickly. Most of my subjects didn’t really love the photo experience. They were musicians and not models. So I tried to relax people, take the photo and end it. I’m sure there was also an element of flirtation involved, which is part of relaxing your subject, along with humor.

Punk came out of NYC at its grimiest. How did your work reflect the times you were living in (and by that I mean, how did you make a living being a photographer in NYC back in the 70s)?

I had no idea that New York was at its nadir when I arrived in 1974. I had just arrived from London and New York seemed vibrant and fabulous to me!

I did NOT make a living as a photographer in the 70s! I always had another “day job.” Until 1978 it was CBGB’s and then I worked for Blondie for a year (for $150 a week!). It was only in 2004 that I quit my various day jobs and have made a living solely from my “art”!

You describe working at Punk as a form of “creative insanity.” Can you add to this, I am curious as to how the insanity nurtured and impacted your work?

John and Legs were both a few years younger than me, and they brought a lot of originality and enthusiasm to what they were trying to do with Punk. They didn’t break the rules so much as they had no idea there WERE any rules! Plus there was zero money, which always fuels creativity. Hey, the magazine’s original headquarters was called “the dump” and it was. Three of them lived there and there was no shower. They used to go over to Nancy Spungen’s to bathe. The most fun came out of the “fumettis” which were like movies or comic books in still-photo form. We tried to shoot “on location” as much as possible but if something didn’t work out John could always draw in the special effects later. It was damn good fun and everybody on the scene wanted to be involved. We got people to do crazy things in the name of “art.”

Roberta Bailey – The Ramones

Categories: 1970s, Art, Books, Exhibitions, Music, Photography

Maripol Shot Madonna

Posted on August 13, 2009

Maripol – Madonna

Maripol’s work as an art director and designer has influenced popular movements in music, fashion, and art since the early 1980s. She was the founder of Maripolitan Popular Objects Ltd., a fashion accessories company that also designed merchandising for Madonna’s “Like a Virgin” tour. Maripol has art directed films by Marcus Nispel and Abel Ferrara; and music videos for Cher, D’Angelo, Elton John, and Luther Vandross. Her clients also include Kodak, L’Oreal, Panasonic, and Peugeot. Maripol’s work has been exhibited at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, Deitch Projects, the Robert Miller Gallery, New York; Musée Maillol, Paris. Maripol has produced films including Downtown 81, which she also art directed, Just an American Boy by Amos Poe, and Face addicts by Edo Bertoglio. She has been published in The New York Times Magazine, WWD, ELLE, i-D, V Magazine, Anthem, Black Book, Nylon, Trace, InStyle, Time Out New York, and The Village Voice, Kurv among countless others. Maripol’s books include Maripolarama (powerHouse Books, 2008) New York Beat: The Making of Downtown 81 (Petit Grand, 2001) and Mes Polas: 1977–90s (Art Random,1990). Maripol lives between Paris and New York with her teenage son Lino.

Maripol discusses her work, Madonna, Danceteria, NYC, 1982, selected for publication in Who Shot Rock & Roll by Gail Buckland (Knopf, October 2009, $40).

Tell me about how you came to be carrying around your Polaroid camera at parties? I ask as the Polaroid is (and was) something so special; before digital technology it was the instant photo; and even now it is so much more—it preserves the photograph as an object (and not just an image/scan). What was it about the Polaroid that had you spending crazy $$ on film in order to get these photos, and how did people react when you asked to shoot them?

Maripol: I carried my camera everywhere indeed and I still have it; its the brown leather clad SX70s. I took it to Studio 54, to Mudd Club, at Fiorucci , on weekends to Montauk, in bed (ha-ha). It’s true it was kind of expensive (like a dollar, a shot) but there was no waste; I used paint, scratch, or cut up the bad results. I knew all of my subjects and the intimacy of the Polaroid did not threaten them. One time I asked David Bowie If I could snap and he said, “No, no darling,” so I respected it!

Downtown NYC in the early 80s is my dream era; post-punk style meeting old-school glamour—and you (in my opinion) were the catalyst for so much of the look. You are a designer, stylist, photographer, artist, model, the IT GIRL of the time. How were you able to fuse your vision with the personalities of the period?

Thanks, I am honored. I think I worked with my instincts getting to dig up materials for objects, and worked when a live model with an idea could have the most impact. It was sort of a sixth sense!

How did you connect to Madonna? What was it about her personality that connected with your own, and what was the inspiration for her revolutionary look—the rubber bracelets, lace hair ties, lingerie and leggings, etc.?

Madonna came to me with Martin B. to help with her style for her first album. In a few words, I would say she was fresh, smart, sexy, active, and just perfect. I thought, “What about a girl named Madonna wearing my crosses on her ears, blasphemous enough and punk.” The rest was like having a Marilyn Monroe in my hands; the 80s were like the 50s; it was all about symbols. She signed the album cover, “For the most perverted mother that I ever had.”

I remember when Madonna came out big on her second album, and all of a sudden everyone was rocking her look. I remember the “Like a Virgin” video when she was dancing on the gondola and the “Borderline” video where she kicked the lamppost with her lime green pumps—hah! I wasn’t even in love with the music, but the outfits—divine! How did it feel to see a legion of women—from little girls to grandmas, suddenly rocking variations on your designs?

There was a Madonna look-alike contest at Macy’s and 100 girls came. Andy Warhol and I were judges and we had a lot of fun. It was surreal but kind of sad at the same time that they could not have their own personalities. That was the power of MTV! But think of it: it happened before with the Beatles, Michael Jackson, Sonny and Cher… It even happened to me. My biggest influence when I was young was David Bowie, his Ziggy Stardust looks, his music, so I went to London when I was 16th and bought green platform boots above the knees which I wore with hot pants, when I returned to my Catholic boarding school they asked me to change—just like Madonna!

Categories: 1980s, Art, Books, Brooklyn, Exhibitions, Fashion, Manhattan, Music, Photography