Issue Icons 2
Mick Rock
By Dan MonickPhoto By Thomas Dozol
For the first 10 minutes of our conversation, the esteemed photographer Mick Rock talked only about yoga. Kundalini yoga to be exact. Not exactly something I thought I would be discussing with the man famous for creating some of the most iconic images of ‘70s glam rock and punk. “I have my own routine which is mixed in with a little Hatha yoga, like head stands and elbow stands, but basically my own routine is a Kundalini yoga routine, and I finish up with a little chant,” he says. Rock’s devotion to yoga developed when his health deteriorated 10 years ago, after three decades of chemical excess. He underwent heart surgery, quit the drugs and did the yoga—and this kept him doing what he truly loves to do: using a camera to evoke/react.
Mick Rock. Research shows that this is his real name. I talked to Rock on the telephone for over an hour. I asked him about Blondie, the Rocky Horror Picture Show—but I did not ask him if his name was real or acquired. It seemed better to keep the mystery alive.
Mick Rock is the “man who shot the ‘70s.” His famous 1972 “party snap,” as he calls it, of David Bowie, Iggy Pop and Lou Reed encapsulates a musical movement and era. All three artists were to come out with genredefining albums that year: Ziggy Stardust, Raw Power and Transformer, respectively. If this photo is the Holy Trinity, his photograph of Ziggy Stardust snacking on Mick Ronson’s guitar strings—what Rock calls the “fellatio shot”—is the Mother Mary, praying to the God of Rock ‘n’ Roll with her teeth bared and legs splayed. Some say this image helped launch the career of David Bowie. While this may be true, there is no doubt that it was the shot that launched the career of Mick Rock.
“It all happened so fast,” Rock says, recalling how he shot this image. “I just banged off a couple of flash shots. He didn’t warn me about it and I wasn’t expecting it.” Afterwards, Rock says, Bowie pestered him: “Did you get it? Did you get it?” Rock didn’t know, until he developed the film. Bowie subsequently published this image by buying a page in the weekly U.K. music newspaper Melody Maker, because it was too late for it to run in the editorial piece that Mick Rock was on assignment for. This image helped create a tidal wave of reaction—it helped establish the glam rock movement that still reverberates in music today. Mick Rock has spent the decades since, documenting the musical movements that grew from this seed.
Mick Rock’s glam era photographs are important, not only because they are iconic images, but also because of the unprecedented access they document. Rock was the official photographer for David Bowie while the rock star was on the road, creating his Ziggy Stardust persona. No other photographer was around to capture these images. As Mick Rock says, “I got the only pictures. Thank God I got them! There [could] have been other photographers, but there weren’t any.”
Some of the most striking of these nascent Ziggy Stardust images are from the so-called “pink room” photo shoot. About these images, David Bowie has said that it was the first time someone else saw him the way he saw himself. Queen came to Mick Rock to help shape the band’s image for their album Queen II. Mick Rock shot the band emerging out of blackness, Mercury’s arms crossed at the wrist, and fingers spread out. That image, Rock says, “has been the definitive Queen shot. It was inspired by a shot of Marlene Dietrich on the set of Shanghai Express.” What is astonishing about these images, is that they were executed without the disruption of stylists, publicists or marketing departments—it was just Mick Rock, his subjects, a camera and an idea.
Mick Rock started his photography career while he was a student at Cambridge University, studying modern languages and literature. LSD and a blond girl turned his interest from words to images. “Oh, the blonde,” he recalls. “I just—let’s be honest—I was high and I picked up a French camera and started to play around. But the first time I used a camera, it turned out there was no film in it. That never happened again… but what I found, when you look through the viewfinder, [was] that there was an intensification that went on. It’s like I was slicing out little bits of what I was seeing and in this process this great dramatic intensification thing was going. So I think I regarded [photography] as a bit like voodoo or magic… you could amplify your subject in some way. And it fascinated me.”
He was self-taught, and driven by changing times and chemical enhancement. Mick Rock found himself in a world that was exploding in creativity and celebrity—and he and his camera went along for the ride. The ‘90s were a slower time for him, in terms of image making, but he kept himself afloat by art directing box sets for Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones and Phil Spector. He kicked the drugs, and concentrated on publishing books of his photographs. Raw Power, featuring images of Iggy Pop; Psychedelic Renegades, featuring images of Syd Barret; and Moonage Daydream, featuring photos of David Bowie as Ziggy Stardust made his photographs readily available to a whole new generation of rock and photo fans. This, coupled with the recent revival of ‘70s rock, has solidified Mick Rock’s fame. In recent years, he has worked with contemporary artists like The Killers, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and the Scissor Sisters.
And when these artists are photographed by Mick Rock, they are photographed on his terms. “If you’re going to work with me,” he says, “you’re kind of gonna wanna let me get on with it… Why pay my money? You could get somebody a lot cheaper; you could map it all out and do what you want… I don’t claim to be anything other than what I am, and do what I do… It’s like an Upper East Side hooker, if you like, as opposed to some trashed out tranny on the Lower East Side or the meat packing district. That’s the way I was when I started out, but you could have had me for 50 cents back then. Today, I want to get paid, or I’ll do it for nothing. Either way—”
I finish his sentence: “You do it your way.” And Mick Rock continues: “Yea, I don’t think anybody ever asked me to do it any other way. There’s me, and I just get on with it.”