Wednesday, 8 December 2010
One of the really great things about being a photographer is that sometimes it can give you access to people who otherwise you might never meet.
A friend of mine, Karl Blake (of the Lemon Kittens and Shock Headed Peters fame) casually mentioned to me one day that he’d been doing some recording with Lydia Lunch. Since I was a huge fan of hers, I persuaded him to give me her phone number. At that time Lydia was living in New Orleans and I just rang her and asked her if I could come over and take some photographs of her. She was absolutely lovely about it all and agreed, possibly because she’s a keen photographer herself.
A week or two later, I flew over and spent an afternoon photographing her in her house and around the city. Which was gloomy and deserted. It was raining heavily the whole time, which imbued the photos with a strange, but not totally unattractive, melancholy.