Lead interview: Iconic Jimi with legendary photographer Gered Mankowitz

An exhibition of portraits of Jimi Hendrix at Dimbola Museum & Galleries portrays the singer songwriter and extraordinary guitarist as raw, new, exciting - hair unkempt, skin blemished, clothes louche and expressive. The photographer is Gered Mankowitz

When you chat to Gered Mankowitz you are transported not to the legendary swinging 60s but to a sense of things being poised to take off: when young people were shunning glitz and showbiz, creating their own music, their own look. And Gered was right there, in the room where it happened. “There was a seedy club in London called the Bag of Nails, and the list of guitarists who witnessed Jimi’s first performance there reads like a page from Who’s Who: Eric Clapton, Jeff Beck, Pete Townsend,” says Gered. “That’s where I was introduced to Jimi Hendrix.”

It was 1966 and Gered was a young photographer. The then unknown American musician was managed by Chas Chandler, of The Animals. “Jimi was exciting to see and to look at. I immediately thought he’d be fantastic to photograph.” It was three months later that Jimi, with his band The Experience, came to Gered’s studio in Mason’s Yard, Piccadilly. “I wanted to photograph him reflecting dignity, respect and gravitas, so made the decision to shoot in black & white – which I later regretted.” The results are classic portraits: “I wanted Jimi the person. No instrumentation or guitar, just him, at a particularly important time in his life and career.” The answer to the inevitable ‘what made you take up photography?’ question is unusual to say the least. His father, the writer Wolf Mankowitz, was frequently being photographed and young Gered loved to “look under the bonnet”, seeing how the lighting setups worked. “One day Peter Sellers came to Sunday lunch. He was a passionate amateur photographer and brought with him a Polaroid camera – one of the first – and a Hasselblad kit.” Gered, aged 11 or 12, was a huge fan of The Goon Show and as Sellers photographed him and his brother he explained how everything worked – “and all the time he was speaking in a Swedish chef Goon Show voice! I was wetting myself with laughter! But when Sellers went home I said to my dad ‘I want a Hasselblad and I want to be a photographer.’” The Hasselblad came later, but it was a cheap camera from Boots that Gered took on a school trip. “Dad thought my photos from Delft cathedral had promise, and showed them to Tom Blau who owned Camera Press. He very sweetly bought two of them for the CP archive.”

Even more valuable than the £5 each for the photos was Blau’s promise of an apprenticeship. “From that moment the door was open, the path was set. I left school at 15.”

By Roz Whistance

‘I wanted Jimi the person. No instrumentation or guitar, just him, at a particularly important time in his life and career’

He paints an enviable picture of his immersion in all things photographic, mixing chemicals, assisting printers, collecting news film from London Airport. “One day I was sent to London Zoo. I was 15, I turned up with a Rolleiflex and the name of the press officer and said [he puts on a highpitched semi-broken voice] “Hello, I’ve come to photograph Guy the Gorilla!” The apprenticeship was cut short when his father took the family to Barbados, and the 15-year old Gered set himself up as a Barbadian photographer. The only dark room he’d ever seen was the one at Camera Press: “I had a series of three butlers’ sinks and was filling them with chemicals.” The local Kodak dealer in Bridgetown was perplexed: “What you doing with all these chemicals man?” He sold Gered some shallower plastic dishes. It was a fantastic learning curve: he did some PR work, architectural photographs, portraits and even photographed the first Boeing 707 to land in Barbados for the local press. “I’d never photographed at night before, but I got away with it.” Back in London, Gered’s father’s connections saw him covering Paris Fashion Week of 1962. He learnt about loading 5 x 4 cameras – “that was useful” – and that he didn’t want to work with fashion editors – “they were horrible” – and his father paid the deposit for the studio where later he was to photograph Jimi Hendrix. Experienced photographer Jeff Vickers worked with young Gered. “He worked in the theatre world, and actors who couldn’t afford him would be passed to me.”

Two of the actors were also singers, Chad & Jeremy, and Ember Records published Gered’s photograph of the duo on their album cover. And suddenly Gered realised he was in the right place at the right time: “The music business was run by old men who didn’t like teenagers or their music, but they were businessmen and they wanted that cash. So they’d use a kid photographer for a kid band for a kid market.”

Jeff Vickers soon outgrew their little studio but by now Gered was established. “I’d met Marianne Faithfull in 1964 and was photographing her: she was managed by Andrew Loog Oldham who also managed the Rolling Stones and asked me to photograph them. One thing led to another.” It did indeed. Gered’s back catalogue is a hall of fame in itself, but what unites his images is an intimacy borne of his

ability to capture the real person. “It is vital to establish trust before a camera is wielded. Bands were always hungry, so I fed them, got to know them.” He adds: “My pictures of Kate Bush stand out because she looks so naturally stunning. Today there’s no reason even to look how you look! But in those days with no post-production a print was absolutely true to the negative.” The Hendrix photographs are all the more striking for their honesty: “I loved that he was a wild man – that hair, those clothes.” Gered has never lost his childhood love of looking under the bonnet, and as post-production techniques moved from the hands of white-coated specialists and room-sized computers to PC-based programmes, his skills developed. At the same time, finding different ways of photographing four or five young men with guitars was losing appeal – so when he was asked by a record company for colour pictures of Jimi Hendrix he had a moment of realization:

“I had the negatives scanned, taught myself colourising and changing backgrounds and made my images more contemporaneous.” Growing interest, with demand for books and exhibitions, has enabled him to concentrate on his archive. “I decided to transition from being an unhappy commercial photographer to a happier photographer working with my own archive.”

He adds: “It’s a big adventure for me, I take huge pleasure from it.” The exhibition at Dimbola, the home, famously, of pioneering Victorian photographer Julia Margaret Cameron, is a strangely fitting location. Both Cameron and Mankowitz are portraitists who capture the story beyond the subject.

Iconic Jimi is at Dimbola Museum & Galleries, Terrace Lane, Freshwater Bay, PO40 9QE until 31st October. Open Tue-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun 11am-3pm. www.mankowitz.com