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Ari Up, Brixton 1992.

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Thursday, 28 October 2010 (More apologies for the further non appearance of this blog. I think my website difficulties are now coming to an end.  They do say you can't teach an old dog new tricks and that would certainly seem to apply in my case).

It was with great sadness that I learnt of the death, on October 20th, of the Slits lead singer Ari Up.  I can't claim to have really known her, though I did photograph her a few times.  

And anyone who went to the Roxy club, during it's initial inception under Andy Czezowski, would have certainly seen her livening up the proceedings.  Not that they really needed enlivening but she did so anyway, that was the spirit of the times.  I was a big fan of the Slits in those days and I must have seen them in and around London in 77/78 at least a dozen times.  It was always different and you never knew quite what to expect, that was why I liked them.

The photograph of Ari above is, I admit, not very good and if it were not for this blog, would probably never have seen the light of day.  It shows her in her normal irrepressible, lively mood in the foyer of the Brixton Academy after a Grace Jones gig in 1992.  As you can see she was also quite a snappy dresser.

She was a real one-off and she will be dearly missed.

The circumstances around the one studio session I did with the Slits is mentioned here -

http://www.derekridgers.com/homepage/Blog/Entries/2010/4/26_The_Slits%2C_Chelsea_1978..html

Phoebe Legere, Carlton Hotel, Cannes 1990.

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Thursday, 9 September 2010 (First of all, many apologies for the hiatus with this blog.  This is due to some improvements that we're trying to make with the rest of the website.)

I first became aware of Phoebe Legere when I saw the film Mondo New York, during which she’s shown, doubtless in some dingy lower Manhattan club, giving an absolutely mesmerising performance of her minor U.S. hit ‘Marilyn Monroe’.  Think Jimi Hendrix but with different hair.  That performance, once seen, I doubt anybody would forget.

As luck would have it, only a few months later, I saw Phoebe on the Croisette, during the Cannes Film Festival, whilst she was promoting The Toxic Avenger Part 2 (in which she played Toxie’s blind, accordion-playing girlfriend).  During a pause, I went over and introduced myself and took a few quick snaps and, later on, she very kindly invited me up to her suite to take some more (of which this is one).  It led to a friendship which has lasted ever since, with only a few hiccups along the way.

Phoebe is a classically trained musician and there’s no instrument that she doesn’t seem to have mastered.  She’s astonishingly accomplished.  When she wants to, she can play jazz piano like Keith Tippett only better. In her lower East Side appartment she once showed me a pile of her best reviews.  It was about a foot tall.  I looked through a few and they were absolutely glowing.  I said to her: “this is amazing, how come you’re not a huge star?”  With her hand about four feet from the ground she said: “Because my pile of bad reviews is about this tall.”  Phoebe can, sometimes, be a little overpowering.

She told me doesn't like this photograph much (but then she did post it on her Facebook page).   She said it made her look like a "hooker in a ten dollar hotel."  Never mind that The Carlton Hotel is one of the most famous and expensive hotels on the whole Riviera, I suppose she does have a point.  I like it because it shows her as she is, always totally irrepressible.

Niagara, Camden Town 2006.

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Thursday, 29 July 2010 I first photographed Niagara on the stairs outside the dressing rooms when her band, Destroy All Monsters, played at the Camden Music Machine back in 1978.  It was one of the first shots I ever had published anywhere - in Zig Zag magazine. Twenty-eight years later, and completely out of the blue, she emailed me to ask if I wanted to take some more photos (that’s the wonder of the internet, I guess).

I was slightly apprehensive. In the late ‘70s she was just about the most beguiling female singer I’d ever seen. But, nearly three decades on, I wasn’t so sure how she would have aged. I wondered whether I might prefer to remember her as she was. Nevertheless, I agreed.

I don’t know what sort of deal she’d made with the devil, but I can honestly say she didn’t look much different to how I remembered her at all.  It was absolutely remarkable.

Marilyn Manson, Utica, New York 1997.

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Wednesday, 21 July 2010 This was from the time when a lot of middle America genuinely thought Marilyn Manson was the devil. Later on in the day, after I’d shot this photograph, religious organisations and deep-thinking bastions of family values such as ‘God Hates Fags’ picketed his gig. He didn’t strike me as being any great danger to the fabric of society.  Quite the opposite.

Lyle Lovett, Nashville 1987.

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Monday, 19 July 2010 This photograph was commissioned by the style magazine I.D. and was taken in downtown Nashville. Lyle Lovett was a bit quiet but he was perfectly compliant and there were no problems at all during the shoot.

Afterwards the writer, Simon Witter, and I went around the corner and found one of the scariest bars either of us had ever been in.  From the outside, the bar looked quaint and like a perfect, bona-fide slice of Americana. So we decided to try it. Once we got inside we realised we’d made a BIG mistake. The entire clientele seemed to be of the crazy, street person persuasion, and they were all staring at us. No big deal maybe. But here’s a funny thing: the bar only stocked a single product – a brand of canned beer. Fair enough, if you only want to drink beer. But there was absolutely nothing else whatsoever. And there were great big boxes of this beer, piled high against the walls all over the place.

It was certainly the kind of place where you didn’t want to find yourself accidentally looking at anyone in the wrong way, so Simon and I went to play pool at the back of the bar, where it was deserted. After a while a guy came over to us and said straight out of the blue: “Do you want to come out the back and help us kill a n_____.” I replied with a terribly feeble sounding “Er, no thanks.” His response was “Aw, ya fucking punk…” and he wandered off. We were both shocked. Neither of us could see anyone fitting the description and it may well have been some sort of crazy Tennessee euphemism for something else. Either way it didn’t sound very nice. We decided to quickly drink up and go.

About year later, I read in the paper that the female singer with a bar band had been shot dead in this place, after she refused to play a request.

The Spice Girls, Holborn Studios, 1996.

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Monday, 12 July 2010 This shoot was for Loaded and the idea, if you could grace it with so lofty a title, was to photograph the Spice Girls, each wearing the football strip of their favourite team. Which was fine for most of them. Both Geri and Emma, for instance, were clearly football fans (Watford and Spurs respectively). Unfortunately, Victoria didn’t have a team and just wasn’t interested in football at all.  Someone involved in the shoot (I don’t know exactly who) showed her a photograph of David Beckham and she thought he looked rather nice. And so, from that moment forth, she became a David Beckham/Manchester United fan. But it wasn’t until my photos appeared in Loaded that a meeting with David Beckham was engineered. And the rest, as they say, is history.

Now this isn’t the way either of them remembered it when they came to write their autobiographies but this was honestly the sequence of events as I understood it at the time.

Theo Kogan, The Astoria, London 1993.

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Thursday, 8 July 2010 I always loved to photograph Theo (lead singer with the Lunachicks). She was, without doubt, one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever worked with but, for some weird reason, always seemed intent (in those days, at any rate) on making herself look unbeautiful. Always gurning and pulling faces. But in a somewhat photogenic way. Seventeen years later she still looks fabulous. I’ve always thought age takes a long time to wither real beauty.

“It’s classified.” Mardi Gras, London 2000.

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Friday, 2 July 2010 What's in a name?

One of the first things most photographers will come to learn when shooting editorial portraiture is that there are really no rules any more.  There hasn't really been for quite a long time.  And fashion photographers threw away their rule book even earlier. Photographers doing just whatever the heck they want, probably goes back as far as Man Ray and the dadaists.

But for documentary portraiture there still have to be a few rules, in my humble opinion, otherwise we'll never know what exactly the photograph is suppose to be documenting.  Although everyone's rules will still no doubt be different, one of mine concerns captioning, which I always feel needs to be as accurate as possible but with one exception - names.  

If I photograph someone in a club or on the street, I don't usually ask my subject to sign a model release.  But I'll always ask for their name.  Yet they are obviously under no obligation to give it.  Or give me their correct name.  Or speak to me at all.  And I completely accept that.  So that if someone just walks off and doesn't want to tell me their name, I'll just caption that photograph as "anonymous".

Also, if someone gives me a name that is clearly not their correct name (and says something like "just call me Ethel Minge" for instance) I'll make a judgement as to whether to use that name in the caption or not.  Clearly many people prefer to be known by nick names (like 'Belsen' or 'Tuinol Barry') and that's fine too. Besides, many people are probably better known by their nick names than their real ones. 

And there will also be occasions, like at Gay Pride, where some people will not want me to have their real name for perfectly understandable reasons.

There will also be times when I'll ask one of my subjects what their name is and they'll say something which I find interesting in itself.  And so I'll use that in the caption.  As in the example above.  It was shot at a Gay Pride event which had been rebranded that year as 'Mardi Gras'.  I asked the bloke what his name was and he simply responded "It's classified."   

Which was perfectly good enough for me.