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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 Keith, but we're not scared.
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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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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'.
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Kane shot Armstrong in Death Valley - one of his earliest photographic assignments. He hired a small four seat Beechcraft plane (which Louis Armstrong was none too happy about) to fly from Las Vegas, where Armstrong was performing, to a deserted stretch of road in the Mojave desert, where Kane wanted to make the photograph. Armstrong had to leave his wife Lucille, who accompanied him everywhere, in Vegas, as the plane only had room for Armstrong, Kane, the pilot, and the rocking chair he wanted Armstrong to sit in - on that day the chair was more important than Lucille. Kane was tired of seeing photographs of him playing his trumpet, with his cheeks puffed out, and so during the shoot, asked Armstrong to put down the instrument. This was about portraying him as a man at ease, with the sun setting in the background, and not as a musician or entertainer.
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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.
