Personal photographer to David Bowie who was also known as the Man Who Shot the 70s
Few rock’n’roll stars have understood the symbiotic relationship between music and image better than David Bowie and, in the photographer Mick Rock, Bowie found the perfect creative partner. Commissioned to do a photojournalism piece by the London office of Rolling Stone magazine, Rock went to a Bowie gig at Birmingham town hall in March 1972, and struck up an immediate rapport with the glam rock guru, just as he was metamorphosing into his Ziggy Stardust persona. It kicked open the door to Rock’s brilliant future, and he would earn the sobriquet “The Man Who Shot the 70s”.
Rock, who has died aged 72, became Bowie’s personal photographer as his profile soared with the release of his fifth studio album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, in June 1972, and captured some of the best-remembered images of the mercurial star. These included the picture of Bowie and the guitarist Mick Ronson eating lunch on a train to Aberdeen, and the famously provocative “fellatio” shot of the duo onstage at Oxford town hall. As Rock later explained, probably with tongue in cheek: “All David was trying to do – and he explained it to me many years later when we did the book Moonage Daydream – was bite the guitar.”