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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.
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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.
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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.
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"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.
