29.09.10
The 25 Bad Boys of Photography
Bert Stern (1929 - Present)
Bad Boy Credentials: A love for women and making famous the images that Marilyn Monroe wanted no one to see.
Self-taught and armed with brilliant instinct, American-born Bert Stern has created some of the most iconic images of the 20th century.
First achieving success in advertising during the fifties for his simple graphic style, he soon moved into portraiture. During the sixties Stern became the celebrity who photographed celebrities and by the end of the decade he operated a prolific studio that employed dozens of people in the style of Warhol’s factory with the fastest lift in New York installed to save studio time between assignments.
This was soon to become an out-of-control empire and when, in 1971, the studio began to implode, Stern fled to Spain for several years, leaving his wife and two children behind. Less than 10 years later he was back shooting for Vogue, his marriage and business failures behind him. Stern states that his two greatest loves in the world are women and photography.
Over the decades he has shot the world’s sexiest females, from Elizabeth Taylor and Audrey Hepburn to Kylie Minogue and Madonna. Over three days in 1962 he famously shot 2,500 images of Marilyn Monroe for Vogue. Marilyn died six weeks later and the shoot and resulting book of images was titled The Last Sitting. The book included contact sheets that Marilyn had scrawled across when she disliked the images.
The graphic quality of these distressed images and their sexual tension has made them the most iconic and troubling of images of the ill-fated star but also raises questions about the relationship of trust between photographer and celebrity. In 2008 Stern re-shot many of the images with troubled actress Lindsay Lohan. www.bertstern.com
Terry Richardson (1965 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He photographs his and his friends’ sexual obsessions, admits to a drug past and has brought a confrontational, and highly sexually charged personal vision to all his commercial work. He’s also published a book called Terryworld and often gets naked when shooting.
Terry is the son of Bob. Bob was a great but troubled fashion photographer who disappeared from the scene in the early seventies. Meanwhile, Terry was growing up in Hollywood photographing his friends and life while attending Hollywood High School and playing in a punk rock band. He started as he meant to carry on and he has done just that.
His snapshot aesthetic, use of cheap compact cameras and sexual adventures didn’t stop him getting picked up and commissioned by magazines such as Vogue, i-D, GQ and Harper’s Bazaar and clients including Gucci, Sisley,Miu Miu and Chloé. His work is always controversial and definitely divides opinions but like so many of our bad boys, he couldn’t care less, producing more books of his work, his own magazine Richardson, videos and a feature film. Terryworld is not for everyone.
www.terryrichardson.com
Robert Capa 1913 - 1954 (born Endre Ernö Friedmann)
Bad Boy credentials: Heavy drinking, heavy smoking, fearless in battle, redefined wartime journalism.
“If your photographs aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.” That was the advice Robert Capa gave to young photographers and the maxim by which he lived. A co-founder of Magnum Photos and considered by many to be the greatest war photographer of all time, this hard-drinking, hard-living man endured the horrors of no fewer than five wars. His most famous and controversial image, The Falling Soldier, taken during the Spanish Civil War, shows a man at the very moment of his demise.
He was born in Hungary, but he adopted an American-sounding moniker in order to appear more glamorous and there by be able to put up his rates. A natural risk taker, the suave and charming Capa staked his life on the world’s battlefields, counted Ingrid Bergman among his lovers and played poker with a circle of hedonists including the writers Ernest Hemingway and John Steinbeck. During the D-Day landings he was right at the heart of the action, swimming ashore with American troops on Omaha Beach.
Of the 106 images he shot over two hours, all but 11 were accidentally destroyed in the darkroom. But there was such a thing as too close: Capa despised conflict and believed that “a war photographer’s fervent wish is for unemployment.” At the age of 40, while on assignment in south east Asia during the first Indo-China war,he was fatally injured when he stepped on a landmine. He died clutching his camera.
www.magnumphotos.com
William Eggleston (1939 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: Guns, debauchery, mistresses and bringing colour photography into the art world.
Born in 1939 to an affluent family in America’s deep south, Eggleston has always exploited the freedom that wealth brings both in his creative work and his personal life. Self-taught and fascinated by colour, it was while teaching at Harvard University that he experimented with dye transfer, a process previously used only in commercial photography and beyond the means of most fledgling artists. His ability to capture beauty in the mundane was enhanced by the saturated results.
His 1976 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York marks the acceptance of colour photography in the art world.Part Bentley-driving southern gent, part bourbon-drinking rebel, Eggleston’s life is as intense as his images. His penchant for firing antique rifles in the dark at his home is well documented, while his past mistresses include Viva, one of Warhol’s ‘Superstars’. In the seventies, he lived the excesses of a rock star, hanging out on the Memphis music scene and attending debauched parties that he captured on film.
His work, which documents the ordinary in an extraordinary way, continues to inspire other outsiders such as film makers David Lynch and Gus van Sant and Bobby Gillespie of Primal Scream, who chose one of his images for the cover of the album Give Out but Don’t Give Up. www.egglestontrust.com
Larry Clark (1943 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: Controversial work, drug fuelled early life, photographs teenagers having sex and guns.
Lawrence Donald “Larry” Clark was born in 1943 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and learned photography at an early age from his mother, an itinerant baby photographer. Clark was working in the family business by the time he was 13. By his mid teens he was already injecting amphetamines and beginning to photograph his friends and the drug-fuelled life he was leading. He continued both until 1971.
In 1964 he moved away from his mother to work as a freelance photographer in New York City but was drafted within two months to serve in the Vietnam War. His experiences there led him to publish the book Tulsa in 1971 on his release from the army. It was to become a landmark work: a stark, gritty and shockingly honest photo documentary illustrating his young friends’ drug use. But it was a cult classic, not a mainstream success, and it was not until the publication of the follow-up, Teenage Lust, in 1983 that Clark’s infamy for the subject matter he covered began to spread. Teenage Lust was another collection of images which documented his own teenage past through images of others. It included his family photos, more teenage drug use, graphic pictures of teenage sexual activity, and young male hustlers in New York City.
Clark’s subject matter was defined – illegal drug use, underage sex, violence, and subcultures such as surfing, punk and skateboarding. But he was still a cult name, known only to a very small group of photography collectors.It was not until 1993, when he directed a Chris Isaak music video that he began to get interested in film directing, which led to his break through feature film, Kids, being released in 1995. It was greeted with the same controversy that had met his photography. Clark’s film and photographic work is about the destructiveness of dysfunctional family relationships, masculinity and the roots of violence, religious intolerance and bigotry, the links between mass imagery and social behaviour, and the construction of identity and sexuality in adolescence, and has influenced film makers and photographers alike. www.larryclark.us
David Bailey (1938- Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He brought the East End to the world of West End fashion, married some of the most beautiful women in the world and never compromises on anything.
What more is there to say about Bailey? He rewrote the rules of British fashion photography, created iconic portrait images, remained a vegetarian and married and lived with some of the most beautiful women of the past 50 years. Brought up in the East End of London, in 1959 he began working as an assistant to the leading fashion photographer of the time John French. By the end of 1960 he was already contracted to Vogue magazine. His East End sense of humour, quick wittedness and no-nonsense approach to everything he did instantly marked out both him and his work as something different. The main character in every photographer’s favourite film, Blow-Up, was allegedly based on Bailey. For that alone he deserves to be in our 25 bad boys. He wrote his own rules and is still working by them.
Robert Maplethorpe (1946 - 1989)
Bad Boy credentials: Frank, homosexual erotic images; his work was banned and censored, he created the X Portfolio and lived with Patti Smith.
Mapplethorpe was born and grew up New York. Having dropped out of college he ended up living with the rock musician/photographer Patti Smith in the notorious Chelsea Hotel where they created art together. Even after he realised he was gay they maintained a close relationship.
Mapplethorpe took his first photographs using a Polaroid camera and in the mid-seventies progressed to a Hasselblad bought for him by his lover and began taking photographs of their wide circle of friends and acquaintances, including artists, composers and socialites. But it was Mapplethorpe’s photographic documentation of his personal sex life and sexual predilections that causes him to be included in our bad boy list.
Mapplethorpe worked primarily in the studio, particularly towards the end of his career, but this didn’t stop him photographing homoeroticism and bondage, domination, and sado-masochistic sex acts alongside classical nudes and flowers.
Mapplethorpe’s X Portfolio series sparked international attention in the early 1990s when it was included in a travelling exhibition.The portfolio includes some of Mapplethorpe’s most explicit imagery, including a self-portrait with a bullwhip inserted in his anus. Although his work had been regularly displayed in publicly funded exhibitions, conservative and religious organisations in the United States seized on the exhibition to vociferously oppose Mapplethorpe’s work and the fact that the exhibition had received government money. Mapplethorpe died in 1989, aged 42 years old. www.mapplethorpe.org
Nick Knight (1958 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He has created some of the most experimental photographic work overthe past 30 years and worked consistently within fashion photography without ever accepting its conventions.
Nick Knight OBE may not be the most obvious choice as a bad boy for his personal life, but take just one look at his work and the people he collaborates with and it’s easy to see why he is in our list. Knight’s first book of photographs, Skinheads, was published in 1982, when he was just a 24-year-old photography student at Bournemouth & Poole College of Art and Design.
He was then commissioned by i-D magazine editor Terry Jones to create a series of 100 portraits for the magazine’s fifth anniversary issue in 1985. As a result of those black-and-white portraits, his work caught the attention of the art director at Japanese designer Yohji Yamamoto where he was commissioned to create work in collaboration with renowned graphic designer Peter Saville. It was the beginning of an incredible career that has seen him shoot for the world’s most influential editorial and advertising clients without ever accepting the obvious or the mundane. Nick Knight is at the forefront of all that is new and challenging. He may be dressed immaculately but he’s still a bad boy to us. www.nickknight.com
Helmut Newton (1920 - 2004)
Bad Boy credentials: He thought good taste was bad taste and that bad taste was good taste, he brought sado-masochism, androgyny and fetish sex into mainstream fashion. He loved powerful women and photographed them how he wanted them to be.
Born in Berlin to a German-Jewish button-factory owner and an American mother, Newton was interested in photography from the age of 12 when he bought his first camera. He then went on to assist the German photographer Yva from 1936. However, the increasingly oppressive restrictions placed on Jewish people meant that his father lost control of the factory and was briefly interned in a concentration camp.
In 1938 his parents fled to Chile; Newton was issued with a passport and left Germany intending to go to China, but after arriving in Singapore he started work as a portrait photographer. Newton was interned by the British authorities while in Singapore and was sent to Australia, arriving in 1940. He was sent to a camp under armed guard, but was released in 1942. After the war, he became an Australian citizen and changed his name from Neustädter to Newton. In 1946 he set up a studio working primarily in fashion photography. Newton’s growing reputation as a fashion photographer earned him a special Australian supplement for Vogue magazine to shoot in 1956 which led to a 12-month contract with British Vogue in London. He left before the contract ended and went to Paris where he worked for both French and German magazines before returning to Australian Vogue.
He returned to Paris in 1961 and continued to work as a fashion photographer but it was when he suffered a heart attack in 1971 that his work developed into the style we know today. The near-death experience had changed his attitude to photography and he decided to take risks, shock, push boundaries and incorporate his own personal desires and feelings about women into his work. Full frontal nudity, voyeurism and fetish became his thing. He was killed when his car hit a wall in the drive of the famous Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood which had been his residence in Southern California for several years. His ashes are buried next to Marlene Dietrich in Berlin. www.helmutnewton.com
David Hockney (1937 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: For accidentally introducing Polaroids to the world of art photography.
Britain’s much-loved artist has mastered many media, the latest being the i-Phone. During the seventies and eighties, he had a love affairwith photography which led to him creating photocollages, which he called ‘joiners’. Hockney’s joiners had come about by accident while photographing a living room that he was painting in LA. Dissatisfied with the distortion produced by a wide-angle lens, the restless artist created his own collage using Polaroids and was so pleased with the result he went on to ignore painting for a while so he could embrace this new world. Often shot at different times of the day, each collage was initially laid out in a grid style. Later works comprised a mass of layered images – the joiners – that, in a Cubist style, became the bigger picture, with some more than 6ft high.Hockney used this technique to create scenes of landscapes as well as portraits. He embraced this style of photography for a short period, before becoming frustrated with what he called the ‘one eye’ approach of the camera. Ditching his 16-year love affair he returned to his brushes.
www.hockneypictures.com
Weegee (1899 - 1968)
Bad Boy credentials: He kept a police shortwave radio in the boot of his car, changed his name to ‘Weegee the Famous’ and photographed injury, crime and death.
Weegee was born Usher Fellig in the Ukraine, but changed his name to Arthur when he came to New York in 1909. He got the nickname Weegee as an easy way to spell Ouija (as in board), dueto his frequent arrival only minutes after crimes, fires or other emergencies had occurred. However, the truth was more mundane. He was the only New York reporter with a permit fora portable police-band shortwave radio and he kept a darkroom in the boot of his car, to make sure his images got to the newspapers first. He captured crime scenes, car-wreck victims in pools of blood and overcrowded urban beaches in shocking, graphic and gritty black and white with his Speed Graphic preset at f/16, @ 1/200 of a second with flashbulbs and a set focus distance of 10 feet. Self-taught, he was a relentless self-promoter who published the press pictures in his first book, Naked City, in 1945. He later worked as a consultant in Hollywood.
William Klein (1928 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: Turned his back on fashion success and made a film ridiculing the fashion industry, not open to compromise and the master of the contact sheet.
Klein was born in New York into a poor Jewish family and enrolled at the City College of New York at the age of 14 to study sociology.He later joined the US Army and was stationed in Germany and France, where he permanently settled after being discharged.
In 1948, Klein enrolled at the Sorbonne in Paris and trained as a painter, under the great Fernand Léger. However, he soon moved on to photography and was spotted by the legendary US Vogue art director Alexander Liberman who commissioned him to shoot fashion for the magazine both in New York and in Paris. However, his photographic passion was most clearly seen in his hardcore, graphic reportage images created in the city of his birth, New York. Working with a hand-held 35mm camera and one 24mm lens he used his artistic training to crop, compose and print high grain images which captured the city as he knew it. Klein’s work was considered revolutionary; he followed no rules and broke those he knew. Grain, blur, motion all worked for Klein, whether he was shooting for Vogue or not, he didn’t care.
He finally turned his back on fashion in 1966 and made his first film Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?, a cruel but accurate satire on the world of modelling, fashion and fashion photography.Based in Paris he then began a series of films which were openly critical of American society and foreign policy, as well as an award-winning film on Muhammad Ali.
Working as a film maker he has created more than 250 advertising campaigns and as a photographer he has continued to bring the same eye and approach that he brought to New York to cities such as Tokyo, Moscow and Rome.
Juergen Teller (1964 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: The master of grunge aesthetic in fashion and portraiture, has created photographs of himself naked and drunk and published them.Redefined the world of fashion advertising with his work for Marc Jacobs.
Juergen Teller was born in Germany in 1964 and moved to London in 1986. His work at that time was cross-processed, rich in colour but not that different from a lot of his contemporaries. But with the end of the nineties came a decisive change of direction. Embracing the prevailing mood in music and fashion of a grunge aesthetic his work became confrontational and deliberately lo-fi and supposedly accidental.
A campaign for Jigsaw men’s fashions of men in sharp suits falling off buildings got his new style noticed. He was off and running, nurturing his own photographic sensibility and refusing to separate commercial fashion pictures from his most autobiographical uncommissioned work. Ugliness is what seems to distinguish art from fashion for Teller. For him the art of photography is how he expresses himself and the commercial world of fashion and beauty is what he fights against.
What makes him a bad boy? His willingness to do whatever it takes to get the picture. So far this has meant photographing himself naked, beer can in hand, at his father’s grave; capturing Kate Moss pregnant and without makeup; photographing himself naked with a naked Charlotte Rampling; ejaculating into a hidden world ofpornographic-looking stalagmites; and crouching in the snow, defecating. www.lehmannmaupin.com
Guy Bourdin (1928 - 1991)
Bad Boy credentials: Misogynist, broke the mould of what is possible within commercial fashion photography.
Vivid, unsettling, extreme and violent are just some of the words used to describe the images of Guy Bourdin. The highly influential fashion photographer counted artist Man Ray as his mentor, and was influenced by surrealists such as the artist Magritte and film maker Louis Buñuel. Born in Paris and abandoned by his mother soon after his birth, he trained as a photographer in the French Air Force. Under Man Ray’s tutelage he both painted and photographed but it was his fashion photography that captured the attention of French Vogue, which commissioned him from 1955 until 1987.
Bourdin’s long standing collaboration with shoemaker Charles Jourdan turned fashion advertising on its head. Between 1967 and 1981, he shot seductive campaigns that blurred the boundaries between advertising and art. Rather than making the shoes the star, Bourdin chose to weave them into his seductively dark narratives.
Throughout his career he was surrounded by rumours of misogyny, fuelled by stories of cruelty to his models. The tragic deaths of his wife and two of his lovers did little to dispel the whispers. Although passionate, he was unsentimental about his work, expressing a wish for it to be destroyed upon his death. Fortunately itremains: a legacy that continues to influence new generations of fashion photographers. www.guybourdin.org
(Nobuyoshi) Araki (1940 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He describes his work as erotic, others describe it as pornographic. Flowers and food remind him of both male and female genitalia,and he photographs the Japanese erotic art of female bondage called kinbaku. He has published more than 350 books of his work.
Araki was born in Tokyo, studied photography during his college years and then went towork in an advertising agency, where he methis future wife. After they were married, he published a book of pictures of his wife taken during their honeymoon, entitled Sentimental Journey. It was to be the first of more than 350 books of his work he was to publish. As a result he is considered to be one of the most prolific artists alive or dead in Japan and around the world.
In 1981, he directed High School Girl Fake Diary, a pornographic film. But none ofthis has prevented him from creating album covers for Björk and Lady Gaga and from being exhibited at Tate Modern. After he was diagnosed with cancer, the main themes of his work changed to portraying the ability to give life but being Araki this still included naked woman.
Just to add to his bad boy image he has been arrested several times for breaking Japanese obscenity laws, but has never faced a prison sentence nor any serious fines. www.arakinobuyoshi.com
Garry Winogrand (1928- 1984)
Bad Boy credentials: He pioneered the technique of not looking through the camera to compose a shot and rarely processed his film.
Garry Winogrand was born in New York and roamed its streets documenting what he saw with an intense energy and physical mania never seen before in street photography. Working likea photographic Jackson Pollock (Winogrand had originally studied painting), he would walk the streets of New York all day, every day, capturing the essence of mid 20th-century America from angles and perspectives never tried before. Trained by the greatest art director of the20th century, Alexey Brodovitch, Winogr and regularly exhibited with his more well-known contemporaries such as Lee Friedlander, Duane Michals, Bruce Davidson, Danny Lyon and Diane Arbus. But he never achieved their level of fame.
He wasn’t interested in fame, his passion was in the process of photography. His photographs depict the social issues of his time and the role which the media took in shaping attitudes, particularly in the early sixties. He was hungry to grab every moment with his Leica, rapidly taking photographs using apre-focused wide angle lens, flinging out his arm to grab a shot or throwing himself to the floor to get the right angle. His approach was photography as physical theatre, with his pictures frequently appearing as if they were driven by the energy of the events he was witnessing.His style has been much imitated, but Winogrand’s eye, his visual style and his witremain unique. When he died of gall bladder cancer, in 1984, aged 56, it was discovered that he had left behind nearly 300,000 unedited images, and more than 2,500 undeveloped rolls of film.
Elliot Erwitt (1928 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: The king of ironic humour in photography
A group of naked art-class students paint a fully clothed model; a soldier sticks out his tongue to the camera; in an art gallery an orthodox priest gazes at a sculpture of a naked, muscular man. This is the world of Elliott Erwitt, whose pictures poke fun at humanity. Born in France of Russian émigrés, Erwitt’s family moved to the US in 1939. While a student Erwitt worked in a darkroom processing supposedly signed celebrity prints.
After moving to Europe to establish himself as a photographer, he was drafted into the military, but continued to develop his skills. His work caught the eye of a group of photographers in New York, one of whom was Robert Capa, who became Erwitt’s mentor. A serious photographer with a humorous outlook, Erwitt joined Magnum in 1953. His celebrity portraits often capture his subjects at their most natural: his Marilyn Monroe looks relaxed and vulnerable while the joy of Che Guevara’s cigar moment drifts across the picture like the smoke he’s exhaling. www.elliotterwitt.com
Andreas Gursky (1955 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: In 2007 one of his images sold for $3,346,456.
German-born Andreas Gursky is often described as a visual artist but really he is a photographer and one who has helped an aesthetic of contemporary photography that swamps the world of photography, that of the infamous Dusseldorf School. Gursky’s vast colour landscape and architectural images are devoid of emotion; he is drawn to large, anonymous, man-made spaces, high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the interiors of warehouse retailers.
There is little to no explanation or manipulation in his photographs, they are as simple as a photograph can be. That is the issue which makes Gursky one of our 25 bad boys. His images seem to be so easy to assimilate and yet achieve vast amounts at auction and in galleries. He breaks rules on what can be photographed and sees beauty in the mundane. That’s not easy to do and yet too many photographers think it is and try. www.whitecube.com
W Eugene Smith (1918 - 1978)
Bad Boy credentials: Frequently over budget and late delivering images, fearless, refused to compromise and hard to work with – a perfectionist who redefined the photo essay. Twice blown up.
After taking photographs for his local paper in Kansas, Smith moved to New York City in 1936 aged 18 with his mother as his agent and began working for Newsweek. He was already a brilliant photographer but also an awkward perfectionist. Despite this he was quickly taken on by Life magazine, for whom he created some of his most influential work. However, he soon resigned from Life due to conflicts over payment, expenses and picture layout. In 1942 he was wounded while simulating battle conditions for Parade magazine and during the American invasion of the Japanese island of Okinawa, Smith was hit by mortar fire. After recovering, he returned to Life and continued to perfect the concept of the photo essay from 1947 to 1954.
Smith pushed himself to unbelievable lengths of both physical and mental endurance to capture a story, and would go to the same lengths to create and print his work, often staying up for days thanks to heavy amphetamine use to ensure that he created the perfect print. Smith severed his ties with Life for the second time over the way in which the magazine used his photographs of the philosopher and physician Albert Schweitzer. Smith then joined the Magnum photo agency in 1955, which should have been a natural home for both his work and commitment to photography and storytelling. His first commission through Magnum was to travel to Pittsburgh to document the industrial city. The project was supposed to take him three weeks, but instead it spanned three years and was made up of tens of thousands of negatives. It was too large ever to be shown, and went massively over budget. Many years later a series of book-length photo essays was produced.
Smith left Magnum. From 1957 to 1965 he holed up in a New York loft apartment painting the windows black, staying up all night for days on end, pursued by his personal mental demons. Gradually he scratched the paint from the windows and started to take pictures through them. In time he came to terms with his mental state and the apartment became a meeting place for contemporary jazz greats whom Smith photographed and recorded via an intricate network of recording devices he had rigged up throughout the building.
Smith finally married and he and his Japanese wife lived in the city of Minamata from 1971 to 1973. In a final photo essay he detailed the effects of Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by mercury poisoning, the result of a factory discharging heavy metal deposits into the water around the city. Smith’s workdrew international attention to the effects ofthe disease. He died in 1978 of a stroke. www.smithfund.org
Wolfgag Tillmans (1968 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: here are no rules within photography for Tillmans.
The only photographer – and the first non-Briton – to win the Turner Prize, Tillmans works in many media and his artwork includes newspapers, faxes and photocopies, as well as photography.
Born in Germany, as a student he startedtearing images out of newspapers and blowing them up on a photocopier. Coming of age inthe eighties and armed with a camera, the young Tillmans sent images of the Hamburg gay and club scenes that he inhabited to i-D magazine and became a staple contributor. Toying with gender themes, he used his friends (whom he calledaccomplices) as models, creating works such as Lutz & Alex Holding Cock that manage to have both an air of naivety and sexuality at the same time. His selection as winner of the Turner Prize in 2000 outraged members of the art world, who dismissed him as a club kid from the i-Dgeneration and claimed it marked a dumbing down of the competition. Although his images have an air of informality, they are carefully considered, much like the displaying of his prints, which are often pinned or Sellotaped to gallery walls or fixed with bulldog clips. His work comes in all sizes – immense images hang next tomodestly-sized ones and the space between them is as important as the pictures themselves. www.tillmans.co.uk
Josef Koudelka (1938 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He photographed the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia with a camera hidden under his coat and got the images smuggled out of the country, to be published anonymously in the Sunday Times Magazine.
Czech-born Josef Koudelka began his photographic career working as an aeronautical engineer. However, as his interest in photography grew he began taking commissions from theatre magazines, and regularly photographed stage productions on an old Rolleiflex. In 1967 he decided to give up his career in engineering to work full time as a photographer and used the same camera to build a portfolio of images.
On returning from a project photographing gypsies in Romania he found himself in the middle of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968. As Russian tanks rolled through themain streets and squares of the capital, Prague, Koudelka stood with his ‘Rollie’ hidden under his coat witnessing and recording the military forces of the Warsaw Pact as they invaded his city. His negatives were then smuggled out of Prague and into the hands of the Magnum agency, which in turn passed them on to the Sunday Times Magazine. It published the images anonymously under the initials P. P. for Prague Photographer, because Koudelka feared Soviet reprisals against him and his family. His images of the eventswere dramatic international symbols of both oppression and the fight for freedom and in 1969 the ‘anonymous Czech photographer’ was awarded the Overseas Press Club’s Robert Capa Gold Medal for photographs that required exceptional courage to obtain.
With Magnum to recommend him to the British authorities, Koudelka fled to England in 1970, where he applied for political asylum. He joined Magnum Photos and stayed in the UK for more than a decade. He now lives in France and Prague, but is a nomad at heart, continuing to wander around Europe with his camera and little else, documenting the landscape and its people.
Tim Page (1944 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: The original wild man of war photography.
If the sartorially elegant Robert Capa is the gentleman’s war photographer, then UK-born Tim Page is man of choice for the drug-addled, tie-dyed hippy. His first pictures, taken while travelling in Laos in the early sixties, captured the attention of the press agencies, and led to him working as an accredited war photographer in Vietnam and Cambodia for the rest of the decade. Never flinching from an assignment, nor the opportunity to take recreational drugs, Page was one of a fearless band that included Sean Flynn, son of film star Errol; their group is rumoured to have been the inspiration for Dennis Hopper’s crazed war reporter in Apocalypse Now.
His reputation for going where no other reporters would dare led his colleagues in the press corps to joke about whether Page would live to celebrate his 23rd birthday. While Page nearly lost his life several times, Flynn went missing inCambodia in 1970. Page never forgot his best friend, returning to Asia repeatedly to try to trace him. A recent discovery may have uncovered his resting place, but that’s not yet confirmed.
In the past few decades, Page has documented the horrifying legacies of the Agent Orangedefoliant and landmines. His images of armyhelicopters hovering over smoke-filled fields and carnage in the jungle seem like stills from films – but these are the real thing. Everything that came afterwards, just like Dennis Hopper’s character in Apocalypse Now, was a mere imitation. www.timpageimage.com.au
Paolo Roversi (1947 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: The master of soft focus, long exposure, intense romantic images.
Italian-born Roversi’s interest in photography began when he was a teenager during a family holiday in Spain in 1964. When he got back home he set up a darkroom with a local postman and began taking, developing and printing black and white images. By 1970 he had started working for Associated Press and had opened his own studio, photographing local celebrities and their families.
A chance meeting in 1971 with photographer Peter Knapp, the legendary art director of Elle magazine, led to him moving to Paris two years later in 1973. He knew nothing about fashionphotography, but nine months of assisting taught him the importance of experimenting andmeticulous preparation. Roversi was soon working for fashion magazines but it was a Christian Dior campaign which brought him wider recognition in 1980, the year he started using the 8in x 10inPolaroid format that would become his trademark and opened the studio he still works in today.
The eighties were a time of experimentation in the fashion industry, allowing photographers to develop their own creative visions. Roversi based his on the paintings, films and photography of turn-of-the-century Paris. His work is hugelyinfluential today but few know that Roversi is the man to thank for allowing soft-focus,low-light images to be accepted commercially. And he is not the kind of man to tell them. www.paoloroversi.com
Carlo Mollino (1905 - 1973)
Bad Boy credentials: He secretly photographed the prostitutes of Turin for more than30 years for his own personal Polaroid collection.
Growing up in Turin, Mollino became interested in design, architecture, skiing, the occult, racing cars and photography. In 1930, he startedhis career as an architect, including innovative furniture and interior design, which he continuedsuccessfully until his death in 1973. It was only then that his secret photographic history was revealed. His executors found more than 2,000 Polaroids which Mollino had created over the previous 13 years. All were of localprostitutes, procured from the streets of Turin by his driver and photographed in various states of undress in a secret apartment which Mollino had designed along the lines of an Egyptian temple. These Polaroids were created to be a sort of ‘book of the dead’, to be placed next to him when he died to keep him company in the after-life.Mollino controlled every aspect of theseremarkable images, from choosing the clothing worn by the women to their precise posing and staging. He often photographed the women against curtain drops or tiled floors, with objects he owned or on furniture he had designed. Although the images were never meantto be seen or published, now that both ofthese things have occurred, these remarkablephotographs have been influencingthe world of fashion photography. Carlo Mollino: architect, furniture designer, skier, playboy and great bad boy photographer.
David Lachapelle (1963 - Present)
Bad Boy credentials: He created his own highly coloured world of celebrity excess and pop culture and managed to get the celebrities to join in.
LaChapelle moved to New York in the eighties and enrolled at both the Art Students League and the School of Visual Arts where his work caught the eye of his hero Andy Warhol and the editors of Interview magazine, who offered him his first professional photography job.
Working at Interview, LaChapelle beganphotographing celebrities and creating his own hyper-real version of contemporary culture inhis images. These got him noticed by editorial publications around the world and earned him commissions to create memorable advertising campaigns. The world of celebrity queued to be part of his photographic world, with stars such as rapper Tupac Shakur, Madonna, Eminem, Lance Armstrong, Pamela Anderson, Uma Thurman, Elizabeth Taylor, David Beckham, Paris Hilton, Jeff Koons, Leonardo DiCaprio, Hillary Clinton, Muhammad Ali and Britney Spears allwilling to do what was required of them.
LaChapelle soon expanded his work to include direction of music videos, live theatricalevents and documentary film with artists such as Christina Aguilera, Moby, Jennifer Lopez,Britney Spears and US rock band No Doubt.It’s hard enough in the world of photography to stand out from the crowd, but to do it by creating your own world and getting everyone else to play along is even harder. LaChapelle thereforeis a definite bad boy for creating his own rules and making everyone else play by them. www.lachapellestudio.com
To read our feature on The 20 Bad Girls of Photography click here.
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