Like almost all of us, Steve Schapiro heard of Bowie’s death on the news. He had no idea, few of us did, that the influential figure was even ill. But, beyond an immediate sense of sadness, the photographer’s first reflection was on how strongly we responded to him: “It’s like a photograph. Sometimes you don’t know why you love it, but it has this warmth, this unplaceable emotion, that draws you – that was David Bowie.”
A performer, a poser, a creative genius: it was rare to ever see Bowie out of character but the pictures that Schapiro managed to capture in just one day in Los Angeles, 1974, and again, in between takes for The Man Who Fell To Earth in 1975, managed such a feat. Immortalised in his latest photobook, simply entitled Bowie: Photographs, we meet many shades of the musician – some are recognisable as famous album art and magazine covers, while others show an unseen, quieter side.
“Bowie was on a personal adventure. A lot of groups are out for audience satisfaction and, while Bowie might have started that way, it quickly became about the development of his personality and really finding out things about himself,” Schapiro explains.
“Amazingly, the majority of this shoot was an experimentation in terms of other personas, other people he could possibly be or later develop, or else there was a number of pictures where you could sense he was looking at the camera but in a ‘real’ way – there’s a true sense of spirit in that.”
Total assurance: “I’ve worked with a lot of actors and performers and very often they have no problem in inventing or becoming a character internally and externally. But if you put them in front of the camera, and you’re photographing them out of character, there’s very often absolute confusion as to what kind of image they feel they should project –and they don’t know who they are. Bowie definitely knew who he was and clearly had a sense of who his persona was at that very moment.”
Steve Schapiro
Mod and rocker: “David arrived for the photoshoot with a number of different costumes and personalities. This was one of them – even the goggles he’d brought with him. The bike actually belonged to his manager, Tony Defries, but you wouldn’t know it to see how comfortably Bowie sits on it."
Steve Schapiro
Bowie in repose: “David’s hand is amazing in this. It’s very strange, I took a picture of Samuel Beckett looking at film, and he also has that same hand feel to him where it’s very boney, angled and has this look to it. I haven’t seen that often. I don’t know what it means but David had this deliberateness to him – I assume he had an idea of what his hand was doing but only he knew what it meant.”
Steve Schapiro
Out of the blue: “David came out of the dressing room in this blue and white striped outfit he’d painted himself, having borrowed a shirt from one of my assistants and began drawing things, which were reminiscent of the kabbalah. That striped outfit recently made a comeback in the Lazarus video, Bowie’s last – it seems to me he had a very spiritual sense in his mind to create that outfit and the idea that it should come up again at such an important time becomes very emotional for me.”
Steve Schapiro
The ugliest shade: “Bowie and I joked about using this horrible green colour as a background to a shoot. No magazine would ever want the photo on its cover… Or so we thought. Eighteen months later it was on the front of People magazine – go figure!”
Steve Schapiro
A moment to reflect: “This is one of my favourite pictures. In a sense it exhibits just a degree of sadness, but at the same time Bowie is being who he is. I think many of these pictures show him revealing parts of himself to the camera that might not have been seen before."
Steve Schapiro
With the journey now at an end, and more stars falling from the sky on an ever-increasing basis, the cultural poignancy of photography seems to have grown in importance.
“Usually when I’ve worked with someone who is extremely talented, there’s a collaboration, said or unsaid, where you’re both working towards this thing, creating these images that you hope can possibly be iconic at best, but at worst really reveal something about that person.”
In Bowie’s case, it would appear he and Schapiro managed to achieve both.
Steve Schapiro: Heroes exhibition opens 9 June at London’s Atlas Gallery; atlasgallery.com. Bowie: Photographs is out now (Powerhouse Books; £30 via amazon.co.uk).
