Blood and Glitter

If Mick Rock had taken only two photos in his entire life- the 1972 shot of Iggy Pop as a burnished statue of sinew and make-up, used for The Stooges’ Raw Power cover, and the hazy, ethereal 1972 portrait of David Bowie, which made it onto the sleeve of Space Oddity – he’d still have been a living God amongst anyone who grew up through the 70s. As Blood And Glitter demonstrates with relentless panache, Rock did not stop at a pair of zeitgeist-freezing images. From the rare, revealing session with Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett in 1971, through to 1977 when his Johnny Rotten portrait took Brit-punk style to the US via the Cambridge-educated rock’n’roll photographer conveyed a procession of key music exposures into his darkroom. What becomes clear, as the lipstick-smeared pages of Blood And Glitter turn, is that Rock was far more than a ‘glam photographer.’ His engorged gallery of studio, live and hanging-out depictions of the ‘Unholy Trinity’ – Iggy Pop, Bowie and Lou reed – along with Roxy Music, Queen, Debbie Harry and more, were as much as creative input to the era of sexshow turbulence as Bowie’s space age strumming or Freddie Mercury’s feather boa. Moreover, Rock was equally interested in recording fringe influences on the scene, from choreographer Lindsay Kemp to the cast of the Rocky Horror Picture Show. As an encyclopedia of prototypical New York-cum-London bohemia, with an arch forward from Bowie and quintessential quotes from Rock and his megastar subjects, Blood And Gliter is an invaluable tome; it is also a major argument for adding Mick Rock’s name to the list of great image-makers of the last century. As the man himself “I was not an outsider looking in. I lived it.”