SELECTED IMAGES AND TEXTS FROM THE EXHIBITION PLEASE TAKE AND RETAIN THIS COPY
Brian Griffin Black Country Dada 1969 - 1990 The images and text excerpts here are taken from the autobiography ‘Black Country Dada 1969 - 1990’ by Brian Griffin. Copies of the book are availble to buy - please ask a member of staff, or to view inside the book use the QR code on the right. Numbers below refer to the gallery guide and plan. 3 & 4 I had hired a light blue Ford Escort and drove to Waterloo to meet Joe Jackson. Mike Ross, Head of Art at A&M Records, had commissioned me to photograph Joe’s album cover. The title was to be Look Sharp!. Meeting Joe at the Wimpy bar in Waterloo station I think we both ate a burger and walked over the road to the Southbank Centre, a feast of brutalist architecture. Noticing the bright sunlight shining through the gaps in the walkways above, I asked Joe to stand in a patch of light, and that was it, I got my shot. The whole thing only took five minutes. For some reason Joe decided there and then never to work with me again, a shame really as this cover is probably more famous than Joe himself. I remember walking down Madison Avenue in New York shortly after the album was released, when a woman stopped me and kissed my forehead for shooting the cover. Where the album cover for Look Sharp! was photographed became my go-to outdoor studio in London, a place where I photographed my own projects as well as musicians and portraits. 5 & 6: How little I appreciated just how important these photographs at the Blackpool Ballroom Championships, taken in desperation for my diploma exhibition, would become. Being so close to our diploma show, as well as being technically inept, I could feel a cloak of hopelessness wrapping itself around me. Reflecting shortly afterwards, I became convinced that I was being looked after by a greater being and thought that perhaps there was a God after all. Maybe I underwent some sort of conversion. Whatever it was, I’ve continued to feel that way throughout my creative life, like I’m being guided by something or someone more powerful. Of course, having been a photographer for so many years, I’ve also come to fully realise that out of a negative arises a positive, similar to the workings of magnetism.
The reality is that these ballroom photographs only just survived as they were dread-
fully under-exposed. I soaked the films in Paterson Acuspeed developer – for a long time – and even that still produced only the faintest images on the negatives, along with a thick base fog. I still find it incredible that, six months later, the prints I produced from these thin negatives launched my career after they were admired by Roland Schenk, the Art Director for Management Today. Life in general can sometimes prove to be quite extraordinary, and a life in photography certainly can. 31 (b&w print in exhibition): Having my own studio was vital for the development of my photography. My time studying and working in engineering proved vital, as did, oddly enough, reaching a high standard in the game of chess. I became fascinated in taking photographs – or rather creating images that I could not see, either by taking multiple exposures, employing simple special effects that I had invented, or using light machines that I had built. There were no computers and no Photoshop in those days. These were analogue times.
One light machine that I am particularly proud of is the one I invented for the
front cover of the album Mirror Moves by the Psychedelic Furs. It embodied aspects of engineering and chess. I had made a wooden frame and within it was a chess board of sorts. It had painted matt black squares in tin plate, hung in suspension, with the white squares left empty. Where there would have been white squares you could see the subject beyond and of course only 50 per cent of it. (continued over)
You placed the subject, in this instance Richard Butler, on the other side of the chess board and took the shot to get 50 per cent of him. I then asked him to stay still, moved the chess board to the left or right, a distance the equivalent of one square, to capture the remaining half of Richard. I did this on the same piece of film by winding the shutter on, but not the film – a double exposure creating a strange egg-box feel. 38. Kate Bush had seen my record sleeve A Broken Frame and was interested in having something similar. So, I had to find a cornfield, which I did, half a mile from my home in Little Frieth, Buckinghamshire. Each day I would leave home at 6.15am to drive to my studio in Rotherhithe. Luckily it was before the introduction of speed cameras.
On the morning of the shoot I arrived in Rotherhithe Street to see Kate sitting on the pave-
ment alone outside my studio. I smoked at the time, but it was still a shock to see Kate smoking a Carroll’s unfiltered cigarette. That beautiful high pitched voice could survive the smoking of a very strong cigarette. My assistant, Kate’s make-up and hair stylist plus Jacqui Frye, who had designed and made the outfits for Kate, joined us and we left for the location. She proved to be a most charismatic woman and whilst amazingly talented, also extremely sexy. Us horny males sitting in the front of the location bus were overcome with her femininity as she disappeared into the back of the bus in a cloud of marijuana. For a few years after she would send me a Christmas card. Vitrine, left-hand side: I had visited Stiff Records and was given my first album cover to shoot. It was for Graham Parker and The Rumour. At that point in time there was a multitude of small independent labels with Stiff operating out of a shop at 32 Alexander Street just off Westbourne Park Road. Dave Robinson, owner of Stiff and Graham’s manager, introduced me to someone who would have a major effect on my life. That person was called Colin Fulcher but was known to everyone as Barney Bubbles.
I would religiously buy the NME every week and was fascinated by these thumbnail line drawings ad-
vertising a single by the punk artist Johnny Moped. I dreamt of working with this person on a project and there, by pure coincidence, Dave Robinson introduced me to that artist. Photography books, apart from annuals, were very rarely published in England but I was determined to do some kind of book with Barney. Here was a chance to work with a great artist and a genius. I invited him round to my flat in Prebend Gardens. We sat on the floor of my living room, smoked a few joints and I outlined my thoughts about the book’s concept. I wanted him to produce line drawings in the style he had been doing for Johnny Moped, illustrating the feelings I had for the images. It would be a cheaply-produced ‘zine with a print run of 500 copies. He knew I didn’t care if it sold, in fact it didn’t! I just wanted to do something with Barney. He titled it Brian Griffin©1978. Vitrine, right-hand side: The Photographers Gallery were planning to have an exhibition, London By Night, but firstly commissioning the photographers with funding from the Arts Council. Martin (Parr) insisted that I should be one of the photographers and got Rupert Martin, the gallery’s curator, to persuade me to do it. I eventually relented because I have to admit that at the time it was a reasonable sized grant! My subject was going to be a nuclear attack on London over one night.
Reading everything I could in regard to a nuclear attack, I gathered relevant images purposefully taken
on a range of jobs from album covers to editorial photographs or company reports. I also remember spending night upon night during January photographing aircraft with their landing lights.
I spent most of the grant I received from the Arts Council on publishing a newspaper called ‘Y’, which would accompany
the exhibition. I’d never seen this done before and I was excited to be doing something new and unique. I asked Barney to design it and be its co-editor. The exhibition and funding enabled us to start the newspaper, and it was our intention to continue to produce it once the exhibition was over. 53, 54 & 55: My career was spent constantly working on improving my talent, always pushing myself to get a better shot. My assistants will tell you how I did it. It must have been quite interesting to observe. I developed many techniques to get my subjects to do what I asked, some of them quite crazy as I would go to any lengths to get a great photograph. Every portrait subject I would approach in the same way; a technique of total manipulation, anything to get a great image. I would forgive myself by having the philosophy that the image I was going to create would go down in history as being an image they would be remembered by. I know they are egotistical thoughts, but I have to be honest and say that is what I felt, and the subjects should be happy to be photographed by me.