-
The Who. They were great, I loved these guys. For me they were like cute little ruffians. They made me think of Dickens, of Oliver Twist, Fagins gang. - Art Kane Knowing that John Entwistle and Pete Townshend wore jackets made from flags, Kane decided to wrap them in a Union Jack: actually two, sewn together for the session. Initially they worked in his Carnegie Hall studio shooting on a seamless white background. Subsequently Kane took the group to Morningside Park, near to NYC's Columbia University. Here he had them pose sleeping, against the base of the Karl Schurz monument. He wanted to show them as both irreverent and lovable in a devilish kind of way. The photograph was a homage to a Cartier-Bresson photograph of a vagrant asleep in Trafalgar Square. An underexposure in overcast conditions produced deeply saturated colours, causing the flag to jump out from the dark background.
-
The first punk rock photograph? Art Kane knew that their image was as 'bad' boys compared to the Beatles 'boys next door' look, and he wanted to reference that, but going into this 1966 shoot for McCalls Magazine with The Rolling Stones he had no preset idea of how he wanted to photograph them. On the way out of his hotel on the morning of the shoot he grabbed some postcards of Queen Elizabeth II from a giftshop. He knew he wanted the band members to do something disrespectful to this cherished symbol of The British Empire. Of course, in the end McCalls magazine were too nervous to run this early 'punk' photograph of Brian, but we're not scared.
-
This photograph was made for McCalls magazine's "Teen Idols" story in 1966. Kane strapped himself into full scuba gear and weighted himself down at the bottom of Sonny and Cher's Beverly Hills pool. He took hundreds of pictures until he got 'The One'.
-
For Art Kane, a face was never enough. With rock 'n' roll musicians, Kane's approach was to strip away the instruments and take them off the stage, and construct portraits that projected what they meant to him. Armed with background facts on Jefferson Airplane, he immersed himself in their sound. He saw flight as a key part of their identity, not just because of the name of the band. In his notebooks he wrote flying by any means, drugs or fantasy, to leave the ground, enter the rabbit hole...They seem to favour the look of the 'bad guy' in the old Western movies... For the cover picture Kane commissioned six plexiglas boxes - at a cost of $3,000 - a huge expense at the time. They were stacked in an environment suggesting a barren stretch of Western desert, in front of a mound of gypsum on the bank of New York's East River across from the Union Nations Building. He wanted them to float, to appear apart, separated in their individual boxes. This photograph appeared on the cover of Life Magazine on June 28, 1968.
-
We call this one "Mothers and Babies". The Mothers of Invention unnerved Art Kane: other people's photographs made them look like Hell's Angels, and as he put it himself,They scared the shit out of me. When he met them he discovered that rather than being hostile, they were the opposite, and that many of the Mothers were, in fact, fathers. So he decided to reveal them as one big gentle family, grouped tightly to emphasise the contrast between the big scary looking bearded men and the tiny vulnerable naked babies. The aim was to make the viewer see behind the facade - just like he had done himself. The shoot was a hoot. As he later recalled: The babies were peeing all over the place! One baby on top peed on Frank Zappa's head, which then ricocheted onto another guy's cowboy hat, then dribbled onto another guy. It looked just like the fountains of Rome. I caught it all with strobe, it looked great but Life wouldn't print it.
