GERALD FEARNLEY My brother, Derek, known as ‘Dek’, was a musician. He always had his bass or guitar with him and played gigs up until he passed away in 2008. In the 1960s, we were all just starting out with our lives. By 1966, I had a small home, a wife and three small kids. Dek would often use my place to stay before or after gigs and he would bring along fellow musicians to our home. You never knew who he was going to bring back with him. My house became a bit of a stop for him and it wasn’t unusual when he showed up at the door with his fellow musicians. If they were playing nearby, they’d wind up all sleeping in the living room. I’d wake up and sometimes never know who was sleeping on the couch. But they were a good bunch of lads. David, especially, seemed very serious about what he was doing, he seemed trustworthy. He and my brother would often be in the kitchen writing. He used to play with the children, games of Monopoly or teaching them how to play the penny whistle. David was great with the kids, very pleasant, always polite. When it came time for Bowie to release his first album, he turned to Fearnley for a series of portraits to be used for publicity. I don’t remember why I took those photos, probably because I was the only one he knew with a studio and camera. I was as much of a professional photographer as he probably knew back then, but I only did still life photography. I worked with cosmetic companies, Dunhill cigarettes, Schweppes; some of my biggest clients were the book clubs. I must have taken 7,000 photos of books. The portraits Gerald Fearnley took of the young musician certainly portray a controlled studio atmosphere. The young Bowie would foreshadow
future characters and future directions, as he painted clown-like teardrops on his face. With Dek Fearnley on bass and credited with orchestral arrangement, David Bowie’s self-titled debut album, David Bowie by David Bowie, was released 1 June, 1967. The very same day, The Beatles would launch Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bowie’s debut album came and went without much notice and Bowie was dropped by his record company. Dek started to go out with this girl, Lucy, whom he’d later marry. I imagine the rest of the boys in the band were just along for the ride. They parted ways after that album. Roger Fearnley, Gerald’s son: “The stories of David Bowie would come up from time to time. My father couldn’t remember much more than saying how nice he was. No one thought to do anything with the photos that existed amongst the thousands of contact sheets and negatives my father amassed during the duration of his long career as a photographer. To think, as a little kid, David Bowie was playing board games with me in my house!” After serving as an RAF photographer, Gerald Fearnley started a career in the mid-1960s as a still life photographer specialising in objects for advertising and commercial use. His brother “Dek” Fearnley was the bass player in David Bowie’s 1966-67 backing group The Buzz. During that time, Bowie became friends with the Fearnley family. Gerald Fearnley was asked to shoot the images for Bowie’s debut album and this photo session took place in Fearnley’s studio in a basement beneath a church in Bryanston Street near Marble Arch in London where David and Dek rehearsed. These charming images were only released for the first time as fine art prints in 2016.
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GERALD FEARNLEY My brother, Derek, known as ‘Dek’, was a musician. He always had his bass or guitar with him and played gigs up until he passed away in 2008. In the 1960s, we were all just starting out with our lives. By 1966, I had a small home, a wife and three small kids. Dek would often use my place to stay before or after gigs and he would bring along fellow musicians to our home. You never knew who he was going to bring back with him. My house became a bit of a stop for him and it wasn’t unusual when he showed up at the door with his fellow musicians. If they were playing nearby, they’d wind up all sleeping in the living room. I’d wake up and sometimes never know who was sleeping on the couch. But they were a good bunch of lads. David, especially, seemed very serious about what he was doing, he seemed trustworthy. He and my brother would often be in the kitchen writing. He used to play with the children, games of Monopoly or teaching them how to play the penny whistle. David was great with the kids, very pleasant, always polite. When it came time for Bowie to release his first album, he turned to Fearnley for a series of portraits to be used for publicity. I don’t remember why I took those photos, probably because I was the only one he knew with a studio and camera. I was as much of a professional photographer as he probably knew back then, but I only did still life photography. I worked with cosmetic companies, Dunhill cigarettes, Schweppes; some of my biggest clients were the book clubs. I must have taken 7,000 photos of books. The portraits Gerald Fearnley took of the young musician certainly portray a controlled studio atmosphere. The young Bowie would foreshadow
future characters and future directions, as he painted clown-like teardrops on his face. With Dek Fearnley on bass and credited with orchestral arrangement, David Bowie’s self-titled debut album, David Bowie by David Bowie, was released 1 June, 1967. The very same day, The Beatles would launch Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. Bowie’s debut album came and went without much notice and Bowie was dropped by his record company. Dek started to go out with this girl, Lucy, whom he’d later marry. I imagine the rest of the boys in the band were just along for the ride. They parted ways after that album. Roger Fearnley, Gerald’s son: “The stories of David Bowie would come up from time to time. My father couldn’t remember much more than saying how nice he was. No one thought to do anything with the photos that existed amongst the thousands of contact sheets and negatives my father amassed during the duration of his long career as a photographer. To think, as a little kid, David Bowie was playing board games with me in my house!” After serving as an RAF photographer, Gerald Fearnley started a career in the mid-1960s as a still life photographer specialising in objects for advertising and commercial use. His brother “Dek” Fearnley was the bass player in David Bowie’s 1966-67 backing group The Buzz. During that time, Bowie became friends with the Fearnley family. Gerald Fearnley was asked to shoot the images for Bowie’s debut album and this photo session took place in Fearnley’s studio in a basement beneath a church in Bryanston Street near Marble Arch in London where David and Dek rehearsed. These charming images were only released for the first time as fine art prints in 2016.
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R AY S T E V E N S O N David was like a cultural sponge. He absorbed information from you. It was like hoarding bullets for the revolution. In 1965, anyone could enter a room and say, “I want to be famous,” and everybody would say, “Yes, great, let’s do it”. But two years later, “I want to be famous” – “Oh… Not cool!” As a teenager, Ray Stevenson worked as a messenger and processor at Roman Processing where prints of a then little known Helmut Newton and Beatles photographer Bob Whitaker passed beneath Ray’s eyes. I was at the bottom of a three-man ladder: I was processing, doing deliveries, answering the door and gradually allowed to work on prints, whilst nurturing a growing ambition to become a photographer. It was at the Middle Earth Club, where Pink Floyd used to play. I met David before one of his shows, and I remember thinking, “What a nice bloke. I’ll shoot his act and give him some prints if I see him again.” David’s performance was a short mime act, in white-face, not like a hippy, psychedelic thing at all. Later that week, Ray spotted David standing on the corner of Gloucester Road tube station. The pair got into conversation and decided to grab something to eat. A friendship was born. It’s weird but had that time gap been greater, like a month or two, I may have passed David by and not recognised him. In 1968, Ray regularly socialised with David and his then girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale. They were a beautiful couple. Fabulous. They looked so good together. Marnie – as we called her – was a professional dancer and with David being very skinny and tall, they moved so well together. It was her movement, her face, her voice. It was like, “Aaahhh!” David would occasionally say, “When you come next week, Ray, bring your camera and we’ll do something,” or we’d just sit round drinking tea and smoking lots of cigarettes. On one occasion David proposed a group portrait as an homage to the cover of With the Beatles. David had recently made an uncredited appearance in the comedy-drama The Virgin Soldiers.
In those days, hair was a precious currency but the filmmakers had made him cut his short. The wig he wore was just lying around. It was one of Marnie’s, I think, and David put it on to cover up his horrible cut – it wasn’t a style choice. In 1969, Hermione left London to film Song of Norway. Devastated, David moved to Beckenham to live with new girlfriend, Mary Finnegan. It was here, at Foxgrove, that Ray photographed David with his new bubble perm look and witnessed the birth of the Beckenham Arts Lab. Mary was a journalist for a national newspaper and got on with stuff. Do this. Do that. It was her attitude that made it successful. We watched the moon landing on Mary’s small b/w TV set. There was lots of drinking and smoking and long periods of nothing happening. It was interminable but David thought it was wonderful. Some months earlier, David had recorded the single ‘Space Oddity’. Ray remembers being at Hermione’s home with Tony Visconti when David arrived with the acetate.
lights it, then slowly straightens up and everything is beautiful. Gradually the effect subsides and he reverts back to the shuffling old man. It was a lovely piece. In 1972, Time Out commissioned Ray to photograph Ziggy Stardust at Imperial College, London. Usually, David would make a reference if I was shooting him. “Oh, that’s Ray down there.” At Imperial College there wasn’t a glimmer. I took that personally. Much later, I realised that David was in character. Ziggy Stardust wouldn’t say, “Hello, Ray”. During the show, David tried to ‘walk’ across the audience. He had seen Iggy do it when he was in The States but the audience were as bemused as anybody and didn’t know how to react. He ended up crawling across! In October 1973, David recorded a television special for NBC, The 1980 Floor Show.
By August 1969 David was dating his future wife.
I couldn’t shoot anything that day. They were really strict about photographers. I spoke to David for about half-an-hour then left. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but it was the first time that I noticed a serious change in him. Ten years passed before I photographed him again. That was at Wembley Stadium on the ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour, 1983. And then around 1999, I received a phone call: “Hello, bloke. How’re you doing?” I didn’t recognise the voice. He said, “It’s David, I want to do a book of your photos.” I said, “Well, if I had a book’s worth, I’d have done it myself by now.” He said, “Ah, yes, but this will have my writing in it.” I sent him loads of contacts and we communicated by email for a year or so but nothing came of it. To be honest, David was not one of my prime subjects. I never felt like I worked with David; I had fun with David.
When David and Angie came to my mum’s house in Finchley, she made us all burgers. David got really stuck in – I grabbed my camera and hastily shoved in some film. I didn’t have time to wind it on properly so you can see fog from the leader in the right hand corner of the frame. From there, I drove them to a small gig in Wolverhampton. The back of the Fiat 500 was stuffed with guitars and costumes and Angie. On the roof rack there were two six-foot cabinets that created this windage so every time a lorry passed the car changed lane. It was fucking terrifying. When we got there David performed a solo set incorporating mime. It was the first time I thought, “This is brilliant!” He mimed a decrepit old man shuffling the streets. He finds a cigarette and
In 1966, while working in a professional darkroom, Ray Stevenson began taking photos of folk musicians at Les Cousins and Marquee. Ray says he didn’t photograph the famous, he photographed the talented who went on to become famous: Sandy Denny, Roy Harper, Marc Bolan, David Bowie. Seeing Jimi Hendrix sound-checking at the Marquee opened him up to electric music and three of his pictures are on the back cover of Are You Experienced. Ray shot all the punk bands, particularly the Sex Pistols, whom his younger brother Nils was co-managing. His work was included in the ‘Faces of the Century’ and ‘Icons of Pop’ exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had five books published and there are two more on the way.
I was saying, “David, you’ve got a hit. This is fucking brilliant.” Tony was less impressed and was like, “Yeah, probably”. The BBC refused to play the song until Apollo 11 returned safely to earth, but by October ‘Space Oddity’ was riding high in the British charts. David went out spending. He bought a load of clothes, an upright piano, which surprised me because I’d never seen him play piano before – and a coal scuttle; a beautiful Art Nouveau piece.
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R AY S T E V E N S O N David was like a cultural sponge. He absorbed information from you. It was like hoarding bullets for the revolution. In 1965, anyone could enter a room and say, “I want to be famous,” and everybody would say, “Yes, great, let’s do it”. But two years later, “I want to be famous” – “Oh… Not cool!” As a teenager, Ray Stevenson worked as a messenger and processor at Roman Processing where prints of a then little known Helmut Newton and Beatles photographer Bob Whitaker passed beneath Ray’s eyes. I was at the bottom of a three-man ladder: I was processing, doing deliveries, answering the door and gradually allowed to work on prints, whilst nurturing a growing ambition to become a photographer. It was at the Middle Earth Club, where Pink Floyd used to play. I met David before one of his shows, and I remember thinking, “What a nice bloke. I’ll shoot his act and give him some prints if I see him again.” David’s performance was a short mime act, in white-face, not like a hippy, psychedelic thing at all. Later that week, Ray spotted David standing on the corner of Gloucester Road tube station. The pair got into conversation and decided to grab something to eat. A friendship was born. It’s weird but had that time gap been greater, like a month or two, I may have passed David by and not recognised him. In 1968, Ray regularly socialised with David and his then girlfriend, Hermione Farthingale. They were a beautiful couple. Fabulous. They looked so good together. Marnie – as we called her – was a professional dancer and with David being very skinny and tall, they moved so well together. It was her movement, her face, her voice. It was like, “Aaahhh!” David would occasionally say, “When you come next week, Ray, bring your camera and we’ll do something,” or we’d just sit round drinking tea and smoking lots of cigarettes. On one occasion David proposed a group portrait as an homage to the cover of With the Beatles. David had recently made an uncredited appearance in the comedy-drama The Virgin Soldiers.
In those days, hair was a precious currency but the filmmakers had made him cut his short. The wig he wore was just lying around. It was one of Marnie’s, I think, and David put it on to cover up his horrible cut – it wasn’t a style choice. In 1969, Hermione left London to film Song of Norway. Devastated, David moved to Beckenham to live with new girlfriend, Mary Finnegan. It was here, at Foxgrove, that Ray photographed David with his new bubble perm look and witnessed the birth of the Beckenham Arts Lab. Mary was a journalist for a national newspaper and got on with stuff. Do this. Do that. It was her attitude that made it successful. We watched the moon landing on Mary’s small b/w TV set. There was lots of drinking and smoking and long periods of nothing happening. It was interminable but David thought it was wonderful. Some months earlier, David had recorded the single ‘Space Oddity’. Ray remembers being at Hermione’s home with Tony Visconti when David arrived with the acetate.
lights it, then slowly straightens up and everything is beautiful. Gradually the effect subsides and he reverts back to the shuffling old man. It was a lovely piece. In 1972, Time Out commissioned Ray to photograph Ziggy Stardust at Imperial College, London. Usually, David would make a reference if I was shooting him. “Oh, that’s Ray down there.” At Imperial College there wasn’t a glimmer. I took that personally. Much later, I realised that David was in character. Ziggy Stardust wouldn’t say, “Hello, Ray”. During the show, David tried to ‘walk’ across the audience. He had seen Iggy do it when he was in The States but the audience were as bemused as anybody and didn’t know how to react. He ended up crawling across! In October 1973, David recorded a television special for NBC, The 1980 Floor Show.
By August 1969 David was dating his future wife.
I couldn’t shoot anything that day. They were really strict about photographers. I spoke to David for about half-an-hour then left. It’s hard to put my finger on it, but it was the first time that I noticed a serious change in him. Ten years passed before I photographed him again. That was at Wembley Stadium on the ‘Serious Moonlight’ tour, 1983. And then around 1999, I received a phone call: “Hello, bloke. How’re you doing?” I didn’t recognise the voice. He said, “It’s David, I want to do a book of your photos.” I said, “Well, if I had a book’s worth, I’d have done it myself by now.” He said, “Ah, yes, but this will have my writing in it.” I sent him loads of contacts and we communicated by email for a year or so but nothing came of it. To be honest, David was not one of my prime subjects. I never felt like I worked with David; I had fun with David.
When David and Angie came to my mum’s house in Finchley, she made us all burgers. David got really stuck in – I grabbed my camera and hastily shoved in some film. I didn’t have time to wind it on properly so you can see fog from the leader in the right hand corner of the frame. From there, I drove them to a small gig in Wolverhampton. The back of the Fiat 500 was stuffed with guitars and costumes and Angie. On the roof rack there were two six-foot cabinets that created this windage so every time a lorry passed the car changed lane. It was fucking terrifying. When we got there David performed a solo set incorporating mime. It was the first time I thought, “This is brilliant!” He mimed a decrepit old man shuffling the streets. He finds a cigarette and
In 1966, while working in a professional darkroom, Ray Stevenson began taking photos of folk musicians at Les Cousins and Marquee. Ray says he didn’t photograph the famous, he photographed the talented who went on to become famous: Sandy Denny, Roy Harper, Marc Bolan, David Bowie. Seeing Jimi Hendrix sound-checking at the Marquee opened him up to electric music and three of his pictures are on the back cover of Are You Experienced. Ray shot all the punk bands, particularly the Sex Pistols, whom his younger brother Nils was co-managing. His work was included in the ‘Faces of the Century’ and ‘Icons of Pop’ exhibitions at the National Portrait Gallery in London. He has had five books published and there are two more on the way.
I was saying, “David, you’ve got a hit. This is fucking brilliant.” Tony was less impressed and was like, “Yeah, probably”. The BBC refused to play the song until Apollo 11 returned safely to earth, but by October ‘Space Oddity’ was riding high in the British charts. David went out spending. He bought a load of clothes, an upright piano, which surprised me because I’d never seen him play piano before – and a coal scuttle; a beautiful Art Nouveau piece.
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PHILIPPE AULIAC There were two Davids: David Bowie the stage man, the war machine in the hands of the ‘majors’; and David Robert Jones. I always looked for David Robert Jones and photographed him many times between 1976 and 2003: on stage, at television appearances, at radio stations, press conferences, private meetings, museums… What interested me the most was what I call ‘the real image’; the one that is not produced or a response to financial consideration. It was about being there at the right time with the right equipment and the right person. We weren’t friends but we respected each other. He was the artist and I was the photographer, the image worker, the outside eye. I first heard David’s music on the radio on Christmas Eve, 1972. When I saw the photographs by Mick Rock, I decided to become a photographer. After three years of study I was hired by RCA France to cover the ‘Thin White Duke’ tour in England and France. The first photograph I took was on 2 May 1976 at Victoria Station when David was accused of making a Nazi salute. To me, it looked like a simple wave of the hand to the crowd. During May and June 1977 – after ‘The Idiot’ tour – David and Iggy spent time in Paris. David stayed at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée and Iggy, the Hôtel de la Trémoille. There was a long corridor that connected the two establishments. David was relaxed and accessible and I was given the freedom to photograph him during his private time. I shot in black and white, primarily for cost reasons, using a Leica M4 and a Rolleiflex 6x6. One afternoon, David suggested taking pictures on the patio of the Plaza Athénée. I arrived around one o’clock and David was dressed in a green leather jacket and a scarf given to him by John Lennon. The atmosphere was friendly and David asked me if I knew the ButtesChaumont where he would be filming the video for
‘Be My Wife’. I knew the studio well and told David that for the past year I had been photographing television programmes there. I explained that the Parc des ButtesChaumont, just north of the studio, was one the oldest Parisian parks built under Napoleon and a popular gay meeting place; this made David smile. In the evenings, David would often walk to a Japanese restaurant called Miki rue Pierre Charron via the Champs Elysées and courteously sign autographs and chat with fans on the way. I remember one morning in 1987, I photographed David and gave him some of the prints later that evening at Orly airport as he left for Madrid to give a press conference. He signed them and gave them to fans before boarding the plane. David was a charming man, curious about everything, very cultivated and, above all, attentive to those around him. I remember once, in a crush of fans in Milan, he told Eric, his bodyguard, to be careful because, “Philippe is in the crowd”. That was David: a great artist and, most importantly, a charming man. After discovering the music of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in 1972, Philippe Auliac decided to become a photographer and began his career in 1976 working for French Television and RCA record company. Nicknamed the ‘Paparazzi of Rock’, Philippe Auliac has photographed numerous icons of music and working as a director, collaborated with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar on the documentary All Things Must Pass and Marianne Faithfull’s An Evening in The Weimar Republic. He worked for 10 years with Steven Spielberg for the Shoah Foundation and with Martin Scorsese for the film on George Harrison, Living in the Material World.
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PHILIPPE AULIAC There were two Davids: David Bowie the stage man, the war machine in the hands of the ‘majors’; and David Robert Jones. I always looked for David Robert Jones and photographed him many times between 1976 and 2003: on stage, at television appearances, at radio stations, press conferences, private meetings, museums… What interested me the most was what I call ‘the real image’; the one that is not produced or a response to financial consideration. It was about being there at the right time with the right equipment and the right person. We weren’t friends but we respected each other. He was the artist and I was the photographer, the image worker, the outside eye. I first heard David’s music on the radio on Christmas Eve, 1972. When I saw the photographs by Mick Rock, I decided to become a photographer. After three years of study I was hired by RCA France to cover the ‘Thin White Duke’ tour in England and France. The first photograph I took was on 2 May 1976 at Victoria Station when David was accused of making a Nazi salute. To me, it looked like a simple wave of the hand to the crowd. During May and June 1977 – after ‘The Idiot’ tour – David and Iggy spent time in Paris. David stayed at the Hôtel Plaza Athénée and Iggy, the Hôtel de la Trémoille. There was a long corridor that connected the two establishments. David was relaxed and accessible and I was given the freedom to photograph him during his private time. I shot in black and white, primarily for cost reasons, using a Leica M4 and a Rolleiflex 6x6. One afternoon, David suggested taking pictures on the patio of the Plaza Athénée. I arrived around one o’clock and David was dressed in a green leather jacket and a scarf given to him by John Lennon. The atmosphere was friendly and David asked me if I knew the ButtesChaumont where he would be filming the video for
‘Be My Wife’. I knew the studio well and told David that for the past year I had been photographing television programmes there. I explained that the Parc des ButtesChaumont, just north of the studio, was one the oldest Parisian parks built under Napoleon and a popular gay meeting place; this made David smile. In the evenings, David would often walk to a Japanese restaurant called Miki rue Pierre Charron via the Champs Elysées and courteously sign autographs and chat with fans on the way. I remember one morning in 1987, I photographed David and gave him some of the prints later that evening at Orly airport as he left for Madrid to give a press conference. He signed them and gave them to fans before boarding the plane. David was a charming man, curious about everything, very cultivated and, above all, attentive to those around him. I remember once, in a crush of fans in Milan, he told Eric, his bodyguard, to be careful because, “Philippe is in the crowd”. That was David: a great artist and, most importantly, a charming man. After discovering the music of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed in 1972, Philippe Auliac decided to become a photographer and began his career in 1976 working for French Television and RCA record company. Nicknamed the ‘Paparazzi of Rock’, Philippe Auliac has photographed numerous icons of music and working as a director, collaborated with George Harrison and Ravi Shankar on the documentary All Things Must Pass and Marianne Faithfull’s An Evening in The Weimar Republic. He worked for 10 years with Steven Spielberg for the Shoah Foundation and with Martin Scorsese for the film on George Harrison, Living in the Material World.
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Photographs by FERNANDO ACEVES BRIAN ARIS PHILIPPE AULIAC ALEC BYRNE KEVIN CUMMINS CHALKIE DAVIES JUSTIN DE VILLENEUVE VERNON DEWHURST GAVIN EVANS GERALD FEARNLEY LYNN GOLDSMITH GREG GORMAN ANDREW KENT MARKUS KLINKO GEOFF MacCORMACK JANET MACOSKA TERRY O’NEILL DENIS O’REGAN NORMAN PARKINSON MICK ROCK JOHN SCARISBRICK STEVE SCHAPIRO BARRY SCHULTZ RAY STEVENSON MASAYOSHI SUKITA
DAVID BOWIE: ICON brings together the greatest photographs of one of the greatest stars in history. The result is the most important anthology of David Bowie images that has ever been compiled, featuring the iconic, the aweinspiring, the candid and the surprising. This stunning portfolio of imagery from many of the most eminent names in photography, along with their own memories and reflections, is a unique collection and the ultimate homage to this incredible icon.
Introduction by GEORGE UNDERWOOD ISBN: 978-1-78884-096-5
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£50.00/$70.00
www.accartbooks.com
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