From a Washington Post obit by Matt Schudel headlined “Mick Rock, photographer who created indelible images of rock greats, dies at 72”:
Mr. Rock, often called “the man who shot the ’70s,” became a photographer almost by accident while was a student at the University of Cambridge in England in the late 1960s.
“I was at the home of a friend who had all the toys, including a great record player and camera,” he said. “Sitting around his room, tripping on blotter acid, I picked up the camera and began playing with it.”
Everything about it felt right — the sound of the shutter, the flash of light, the sense of searching for the essence of the person on the other side of the lens. Mr. Rock was barely 20 when he took his portraits of a budding rock star, Syd Barrett, a friend who was a co-founder of Pink Floyd.
“He looked like a poète maudit,” Mr. Rock told NPR’s “Fresh Air,” using a term that described an antisocial “accursed poet” in 19th-century France. “He just had that romantic aura about him.”
Early in 1972, Mr. Rock met Bowie, then in his androgynous “Ziggy Stardust” period. Bowie had a shock of bright red hair, wore elaborate makeup and outfits, and projected an air of glamour, danger and sexual ambivalence.
One of their first portrait sessions took place, improbably enough, in Bowie’s infant son’s bedroom. Mr. Rock recognized in Bowie a near-perfect subject: He had a beautiful face and a powerful persona that Mr. Rock considered the essence of rock-and-roll.
“Remember they are often called an ‘act’ — and it’s for a reason,” Mr. Rock said in 2009. “They have to become the character they have created to project their music, their art — something bigger than life. Even I go through a change and become this rather raucous and very high-key character, ‘Mick Rock,’ when I take photos.”
Mr. Rock was Bowie’s personal photographer for several years, and the two became close friends. Bowie introduced him to other rising figures in the rock world, including Reed and Pop. Mr. Rock captured memorable images of both, including some black-and-white shots of Reed performing in London.
While Mr. Rock was developing the photos, they went slightly out of focus. One picture, showing Reed peering out, while wearing eye makeup and holding his guitar, became the cover art for his 1972 album “Transformer.” It became, in many ways, the defining image of Reed.
“For the rest of his career, he was haunted by that particular shot,” Mr. Rock said . “A lot of people don’t even think that’s a performance shot because it’s a very quiet shot.”
About the same time, Mr. Rock photographed a gaunt, shirtless Pop holding the microphone in both hands and looking pensively into the audience. That image became the cover of Pop’s 1973 album “Raw Power.”
In 1974, Mr. Rock made a group portrait of the British glam-rock band Queen, showing their faces in stark shadows as lead singer Freddie Mercury crossed his hands over his chest. The photo, which appeared on the cover of the album “Queen II,” was modeled after a movie still Mr. Rock had seen of Marlene Dietrich in the 1932 film “Shanghai Express.”
Mr. Rock went on to photograph dozens of rock musicians, including the Ramones, the Sex Pistols, Joan Jett and Blondie’s Debbie Harry, whom he called “the most naturally photogenic person I’ve ever shot.” In 1975, he shot still photographs on the set of the cult classic film “The Rocky Horror Picture Show.”
Mr. Rock moved to New York in 1977 and, for years, was a fixture in the rock-and-roll world, indulging in the sex and drugs that went with it.
“I was not an outsider,” he told NPR. “This was my life, too. I mean, I didn’t play an instrument, but I lived the life.”
He gave up drugs and cigarettes in 1996, after undergoing quadruple heart bypass surgery. Soon afterward, his photography began to be recognized as fine art and was featured in exhibitions, including at Govinda Gallery in Washington. He published a series of books.
“My camera was the key to being part of the glammy and punky stuff,” Mr. Rock said in 2017. “I never reflected on what I was doing. I still shoot today because that is the bit I love most. It’s like a hit song — I still want to produce a picture that people will come back to again and again.”
Mr. Rock was born Nov. 22, 1948, in London. Little is known of his early life, and even his name is in doubt. He usually said his given name was Michael David Rock. But in a 2017 online interview, he said that he was named Michael Edward Chester Smith for the first two years of his life and that he was born after his mother had an affair with an American airman.
In 1970, after completing his studies in modern languages and literature at Cambridge, Mr. Rock moved to London. He had an early marriage that ended in divorce. In addition to photographing musicians, he also wrote liner notes and contributed to Rolling Stone and other music publications.
In 2015 and 2016, Mr. Rock had a cable TV series, “On the Record with Mick Rock,” in which he interviewed musicians. A documentary about his life, “Shot: The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock,” directed by Barney Clay, was released in 2017.
Mr. Rock lived for many years on Staten Island with his wife, Pati Rock, and their daughter, Nathalie.
Known for the striking images he shot in the 1970s, Mr. Rock remained an active photographer and was not slowed by a kidney transplant in 2012. His subjects in recent years included Lady Gaga, Snoop Dogg, the Foo Fighters and Pharrell Williams. Last year, he shot the cover art for Miley Cyrus’s new album, “Plastic Hearts.”
“I am in the business of evoking the aura of the people and photographing,” Mr. Rock told the BBC in 2007. “I’m not necessarily looking for a literal reality, I’m looking for something that’s got a bit of magic to it, and quite where that comes from or when that moment is you can’t prescribe.”
Matt Schudel has been an obituary writer at The Washington Post since 2004. He previously worked for publications in Washington, New York, North Carolina and Florida.
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Also see the New York Times obit by Neil Genzlinger headlined “Mick Rock, Sought-After Rock Photographer, Dies at 72.” The opening grafs:
Mick Rock, whose striking images of David Bowie, Lou Reed, Debbie Harry, as well as more recent stars like Theophilus London and Snoop Dogg, made him one of rock and pop’s most acclaimed photographers, died on Thursday at a hospital in Staten Island….
Mr. Rock was often called “the man who shot the ’70s” because of his photographs that captured the rock stars of that flamboyant decade, both in his native England and in New York. He lived the rock lifestyle as he was photographing it, becoming part of the scene inhabited by Mr. Bowie, Mr. Reed and the rest.
“I was drawn to the good, the bad and the wicked,” he said in “Shot! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock,” a 2016 documentary about him directed by Barney Clay….
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