Wednesday, 21 April 2010
I decided to do this blog after the encouragement and support of my website guru Rupert Field. We reckon that it'd be as good a place as any for me to write about and explain how some of my photographs came about.
I’d also like to thank my son for coming up with the title for my blog, I just hope he’s not taking the mick.
Anyway, I'm starting with one of my favourites - of Sinead O'Connor, photographed in Battersea in 1988.
A couple of weeks before this shot was taken, I’d got a commission from the NME to photograph Sinead in Liverpool. The writer and I went up there and we were booked into the same hotel as Sinead and her manager. In the evening we all met and went out for a drink in order to get to know one another. Later, long after me and the writer were tucked up in bed, Sinead had gone out again, got involved in an altercation with a nightclub bouncer and been given a black eye.
Anyway, in the morning we awoke to find a still very upset Sinead and, understandably, she was unwilling to do any photos. In those days, I thought it was paramount for me never to go home without getting “the shot”, whatever the reason, so I offered to photograph her from one side, so that the black eye would be in shadow. But, in all honesty, that would have not helped either of us much and she wouldn’t do it anyway. It was agreed that once her face had recovered the photo shoot would be rescheduled.
I heard nothing for a few weeks and then it was just my luck to be given a date when I was due to be in LA on another job. I was desperate not to lose out, so I figured that, if I flew back from LA and got a cab from the airport straight to the location in Battersea (where Sinead was making a pop video) I could still do it. This shot was taken soon after I arrived. But initially I wasn’t satisfied. Sinead then told me that if I waited around for a while, we could do some more photos later on. I was tired but I waited around for her all day until the evening. At which point she just upped and left without saying a word.