Acclaimed photographer Gered Mankowitz has recalled working with Jimi Hendrix.
To modern fans, Jimi Hendrix is an enigma to be grasped through flickering images and photographs. Yet through his work with the guitarist, Gered Mankowitz was able to portray something at once intimate yet glamourous.
The photographer became closely associated with the guitarist, taking many of the shots which have gone on to define Jimi Hendrix in the popular consciousness.
Speaking to ClashMusic ahead of a new exhibition, Gered Mankowitz explained how the relationship progressed. “I didn’t ask Jimi to smile, he just naturally was quite smiley, and we laughed quite a lot at the session. That was the first session in ’67, and funnily enough most young men in music, young musicians, want to look mean, moody and sexy.”
“There was a lot of laughter in the session and I caught that because Jimi looked great when he smiled and because the nature of the photography then, it was looser, because we didn’t have Polaroid, so you couldn’t show somebody what you were doing, there was always a looseness to the shoot.”
“So a lot of the pictures of him smiling were never ever printed at the time, because that’s not the image that anybody wanted to present, they wanted moody.”
Continuing, Gered Mankowitz explained that some of his most well known images only penetrated the popular consciousness in the early 90s. “I had a solo show in Soho, in ’92, and that was a catalyst for a lot of things. It was my own retrospective, everybody: the Eurythmics were in there, Kate Bush was in there, the Stones, Jimi, Marianne, lots of people.”
“But I started manipulating and began to reinterpret my images for that show and that acted as a catalyst, and then I started showing my Jimi work for the first time properly at that show and there was huge interest in that, and that triggered off the association officially with the Jimi management and the Jimi record company, and so in a way that was the catalyst. It was from ’92 that my archive started going up and my commercial career was going down.”
Gered Mankowitz opened his new exhibition in London’s Snap Gallery on Saturday (September 18th).
