20.05.10
What is the State of Music Photography Today?
The advent of music and image downloads has seen the world of music and music photography turned on its head and made more accessible than ever before. A veteran of the days of vinyl and film, Peter Silverton reports back from the mosh pit on how to make money from teenage rebellion.
Two chill early evenings in London: that post-work, pre-dinner time in which the blessed and invited nibble, sip and natter their way across the city’s galleries, events and private views. The clock ticks to it every weekday around 6.30pm. It’s the golden hour – or two – in which the art and media world (plus a leavening of freeloaders and politicians) meet, mix, gossip, conspire, show off, suck up, bitch, sneer, flirt, apply for jobs, drop hints, drink free champagne and eat little circly smoked salmon things. Oh, and charm the richest people in the room. They’re most likely the ones picking up the food and drink bill.
In Elvis Costello’s words, it’s London’s brilliant parade – the time, places and manner in which the city’s visual arts people establish, elaborate and make sense of their place in the world. Not only in London, of course. New York, too. And Los Angeles and Paris. Barrow-in-Furness? No. Dublin? Now and then. Barcelona? Nowhere near as often as you might think. Manchester? Perhaps once a week, and then it might even take place in London – as it did for the first of my two early-evening outings. I was at the old Central School of Art and Design building on the corner of Southampton Row in Holborn, for a talk about Kevin Cummins’ new book of photographs, Manchester: Looking for the Light Through the Pouring Rain. He was joined on stage by pop commentator Paul Morley and Mike Pickering – the man who signed the Happy Mondays to Factory Records. Three Mancunians, now all based in London – and participants in its brilliant parade. Among the seated and suited were The Clash’s first (and last) manager, Shane MacGowan’s first love and The Sex Pistols’ Glen Matlock.
I was there because, once upon a very long time ago, I was a music writer and editor on Sounds magazine – when punk was young and now-famous rock photographers were hustling around black-painted, sticky-floored basements. I spent a lot of time with them in that underground world. At the risk of sounding like a Wayne’s World roadie, I remember helping Ray Stevenson wire up his slave-drive flashes for gobbed-on shows at the Roxy and the Vortex. And cabbing it up to Bermans in Somers Town to pick up a hussar uniform for Mick Jones to wear in a Clash shoot with Chalkie Davies. And chatting away with Tom Waits while Colin Jones took his picture in the shadow of the New Yorker Hotel – now available, like his Observer magazine shot of The Who and the Union Jack, as a limited-edition print from his website.
I was on The Clash’s London Calling tour of the US, along with Pennie Smith, though not at the New York show where she shot the album’s cover image of Paul Simonon smashing his bass. The one, that is, which appeared on a recent Royal Mail first class stamp and is available as a silver 40 x 50cm gelatin signed print for £4,000, unframed. Some perspective: auctioned by Bonhams in December 2009, the original artwork for the album sleeve, by cartoonist Ray Lowry, fetched £72,000. It was ticket-only evening in Southampton Row – with drinks later for the blessed and invited, of course. And it was full – for a discussion about photographs. In particular, about some pictures that Cummins took more than three decades ago – for the NME, black and whites of Joy Division in northern snow. The images, that is, which both established the band’s emotional timbre and set the visual tone for a decade of indie alienation.
The audience wanted to know everything they could about these photographs. Young men and women asked long, detailed questions, often in American accents. Eventually, Cummins said: “Can we please have some questions that aren’t for people’s PhDs?” And when he had finished answering them, there was a long, long queue for signed books. Rock photography and PhD in the same paragraph? When did that become possible? Photography and pop (and rock and rock ‘n’ roll) have always been fast friends. The iconic image has always been as central to our thoughts and feelings as the actual music ever was. Think Elvis and you inevitably – to paraphrase that iconic magazine editor Maggie Prescott – think pink jacket. Or, if it’s cash you’ve got in mind, think Wertheimer. When Alfred Wertheimer took a picture of Elvis kissing a girl on a backstage staircase, the new young southern singing star was just one more subject in a stream of photojournalist assignments. Now, though, says Wertheimer, “the largest part of his income” comes from his Elvis pictures – and that kissing picture is the star performer, by far.
The Rolling Stones found themselves and their look with considerable help from David Bailey, Gered Mankowitz and Michael Cooper. The Beatles were introduced to the world via an album cover shot by that camp showbusiness surrealist Angus McBean – which was followed by a long and close association with Robert Freeman. Yet pop photography is a newcomer to the early-evening shmooze and booze. Painters, sculptors, film makers, even ceramicists, they’re the established basics of the private view hours. Photographers, too, but, traditionally, art – and celebrity – ones mostly. A couple of years ago, the National Portrait Gallery celebrated McBean’s cover shot with a whole show of its own, Beatles on the Balcony. This winter past, there was a Beatles to Bowie exhibition at the gallery. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Museum hosted “the first major museum exhibition on rock and roll to put photographers in the foreground”: Who Shot Rock & Roll. Why? In the words of the blurb: “From its earliest days, rock and roll was captured in photographs that personalised, and frequently eroticised, the musicians, creating a visual identity for the genre. The photographers were handmaidens to the rock-and-roll revolution, and their images communicate the social and cultural transformations that rock has fostered since the 1950s.” There’s a book to go with it, too.
So what’s going on? And why? Chase the money: that’s always a good start. As Wertheimer has found, pop pictures sell – pop picture books, too, as Cummins has found. Have a look at www.rockarchive.com, set up by Jill Furmanovsky, another photographer with whom I spent long, slow hours waiting for lead guitarists to get out of bed. Rockarchive offers “limited-edition rock and roll photographic prints” and is hosting the Brooklyn Musuem show at its Islington gallery. At the exhibition opening, there was a book signing and a Q&A with the author-curator Gail Buckland – professor of the history of photography at Cooper Union. After, there were drinks at Fredericks in Camden Passage.
Alternatively, visit www.morrisonhotelgallery.com, a US equivalent to Rockarchive, named after a Doors album. Janette Beckman is one of the photographers represented by Morrison Hotel, which has galleries in New York and Los Angeles. Based in Manhattan since 1982, Janette was one of the first to photograph the emerging hip hop scene, particularly for English publications. “I was so happy shooting the new music scene – kind of like a renaissance of poetry, music, fashion, art, break dancing! It was exciting, like the Brit music scene had been in the late 1970s.”
She’s a friend – and a (distant) cousin by marriage, though we only found that out after 30 years or so. We might even have met the day she got her first editorial commission. “I took my portfolio to Sounds and Vivien Goldman asked me to shoot Siouxsie and the Banshees and Spizz at the Roundhouse that night.” Vivien was the features editor and worked at the desk next to mine. Janette’s CV runs from punk through to The Police and Boy George to recent commercial projects for Casio, Schott and the Scottish Fashion Council. “Sadly, there seems to be much less editorial work these days,” she says. Prints are now a major part of her income. “About 50% of my work is focused on exhibitions and gallery sales. It’s funny that photo assignments I shot for the likes of Melody Maker for £30 are now considered ‘iconic’ images and sell as art.” Not just in London, New York and Los Angeles, either. “I had a show in Sydney last October and was amazed by the Australians’ enthusiasm for punk and hip hop.” So now, as well as being celebrated at private views and the subject of postgraduate study, pop photography has found
new sources of cash, particularly cash from what the music business calls back catalogue. These are new developments in the long-term relationship between the graven image and the sound of music – between pop and pictures, between rock bands and photographers. See where fast friendships can get you.
It’s clear how this is playing out – and paying out – for photographers with a catalogue of iconic images, but where does that leave modern, younger successors? In a world where seismic technological changes are shaking the whole business into a still completely unclear future? Anyone with a half-decent camera – or even a mobile phone – can now take a half-decent picture (in good daylight anyway). Digital imagery has reduced processing costs to zero – well, plus a penny or two for electricity. Printing has never been cheaper. Delivery is virtual – leaving bike messengers sitting around twiddling their clutches. And, as Janette points out, commissions are rare and getting rarer while rates are falling and falling. All true for all photographers but particularly true for rock photographers – it’s never been easier to get a photo pass for a gig. If anyone can get in the game, can anyone make it make pay? What about the current generation of young and ambitious rock photographers?
And so to that other chill early-evening outing, to the Proud Gallery in Camden Town – no more than a hefty gob from what, in Janette’s day (mine, too, of course), was The Clash’s Rehearsal Rehearsals base. Founded in 1988, Proud now has four spaces and has been the venue for many pop shows. “Pop is all about people enjoying music,” said founder, owner and Led Zeppelin lover Alex Proud. “It’s about the soundtrack to your life and the idols who define it. Photographers capture this, isolating an otherwise fleeting moment. The relationship is an important one. Pop is very visual: photography allows this to be seen. Without it, the music world would be a very different beast.”
So, another opening, another glass of champagne, this time for the rock photography of a young Frenchwoman Sophie Jarry. She grew up in Angers, where her father converted the basement of their house into a dark room. She translated The Pixies’ biography into French and has been taking rock pictures since 2004. She did an arena tour of the UK with Razorlight in 2006. She’s had her work published both in the UK (NME, Loud & Quiet) and France (Mixte, Howl, Rock ‘n’ Folk). “But over the last two years, many magazines have had a lot of difficulties in terms of being able to pay their contributors. Three of the magazines I worked with regularly don’t exist now,” she says. There are four walls of her black and white prints – at £200 or so each. Live shots of, among others, Iggy Pop, Pete Doherty, Jack White. And portraits of younger musicians: notably of Alison Mosshart (The Kills and The Dead Weather), Bill Ryder-Jones (once of The Coral), Miles Kane (The Last Shadow Puppets). “The artists who have been most important to me over the last two years.” Alison was at the launch party.
Like Janette and her generation, Sophie is a fan, led to professional photography by her passion for music. “I want to capture sensibility, emotions and feelings. This is what music is about.’ Her favourite portraits are the ones of Bill Ryder-Jones, particularly the one at his mother’s house in suburban Liverpool. “A year ago I listened to his songs, I absolutely loved them all. I’ve listened to his music every day since then. I sometimes feel like I couldn’t live without his music.” He wrote and recorded a special soundtrack for the show. “Bill is one of the most important persons to me. I need to speak with him a lot.”
While Sophie has only just set up a website, other young rock photographers are determinedly digital. Amy Muir, a 22-year-old Scot who is about to spend a year in Toronto, got her first photo pass when she was just 17 – for a Panic! At The Disco show. The pictures were published in the US, in Alternative Press Magazine. In 2006, she was the Bristol Carling Academy Music Photographer of the Year. “I look to produce an image that fans will look at and remember the gig by. I want people to look at my images and practically hear the music through the photographs, as cheesy as that may sound.” She started up her website in November last year. It was built by another photographer, Andrew Kendall. “I was surprised by how much more photographic work I have received and just how many people view your website from all over the world,” she says.
Tom Leishman is a friend of Amy’s and barely a year older. His photographs are clearly pop – of young bands he met through Frankie Sandford of the Irish-British girl group, The Saturdays. Heavily Photoshopped, his portraits of young popsters have an almost 1970s innocence about them – as if Gary Glitter’s career had never gone down, well, the Gary Glitter. Look on Tom’s website and you’ll believe that the Scout hall dance can go on forever. Half a million others have already checked it out for its sweet and bright pictures. “I hope that my images will be a great source of memories and emotion of the moments I capture for as many people as possible,” he says. How, I wondered, does Alex Proud reckon pop photography is getting on in this time of internet, digital technology and the mobile phone. “The internet doesn’t tend to affect us too much. Looking at an image on your computer screen is a far cry from seeing it on a gallery wall. We aren’t really affected by people stealing images from the internet. If you are going to print a 72dpi image from the web, the chances are you are not enough of a fan to have bought a print in the first place.”
Alex is hyper-conscious of the changes going on in both pop, photography and publishing of all kinds. “The media is being re-invented. In some ways, the implications for photography mirror that of pop music – piracy, for example. Both industries need to adjust, but personally, I believe they will. “It is true that now anyone can take a photo on a camera phone at a gig. Many of these photographs can come out okay, but okay is not what we are looking for. There is this idea at the moment that everyone is a photographer. The facts are different. It takes someone with a real eye to be able to exploit the camera to its full potential. Very few can take a really good photograph, the kind of photograph that will live on and on,” he says.The kind of photograph, that is, like the ones I saw being created in London basements and on the pavements of New York. “Back in the day when every roll of film cost money to develop and print,” says Janette of those pre-digital, pre-Photoshop years, “we were much more careful, paid more attention to what we were shooting. I think that made us better photographers. We were all about capturing the perfect moment in time.”
Which, of course, is the same kind of photographs that Amy, Sophie and Tom aspire to take. And might already have taken. Only time – that longest of exposures – can answer that one.
www.kevincummins.co.uk
www.janettebeckman.com
www.sophiejarry.daportfolio.com
www.flickr.com/photos/amymuir
www.tomleishman.com
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