Andy Earl: Capturing Controversy
What happens when the first real job of a photographer’s career brings not just a slice of the action, but an unexpected controversy that would go down in 1980s pop history? This was the experience of music industry photographer Andy Earl when — fresh out of college in 1980 — he got a call from Sex Pistols manager Malcolm McLaren to shoot an album cover for manufactured New Romantic pop band Bow Wow Wow. It was a commission that would see Earl arrested thanks to the cover image featuring an artistically naked lead singer, Annabella Lwin, in a parody of Le Déjeuner Sur l’Herbe (The Luncheon on The Grass) by French painter Edouard Manet.
You see, being uncompromisingly creative can unwittingly get you into scrapes — the trouble here being that Lwin was only 15 years of age at the time, and her mother wasn’t best pleased. The story was all over the tabloids in a flash, and publicity duly arrived by the truckload. The band’s next single went to number one. Nice work, Malcolm.
With the controversy smoothed over, and his freedom restored, Earl’s sudden taste of notoriety might have persuaded him to scrap his fledgling career there and then, but suffice to say he was undeterred by this unusual setback. He would go on to capture an array of iconic images for some of the biggest bands in the world — the archive section of his Web site is now a musical Who’s Who of the past quarter century. Meanwhile, there’s no doubt that Earl sports a personality to match the famous names that have stood before his lens — a shrinking violet he certainly is not — and he brims with the kind of anecdotes that only decades of experience at the sharp end of the industry can deliver.
It’s an accepted fact that the way a photographer handles their subjects has an enormous impact on the kind of images that can suddenly present themselves. Some photographers can get a subject to open up and be themselves, whilst another may just get the standard face of a celebrity.
Earl has this special ability in spades. His signature use of ring flash on portraits has also added to his lofty reputation among the celebrity set: “It takes ten years off a face”, says Earl. A younger looking celebrity is a happy celebrity, naturally. It was his experimental approach to photography whilst at college that got him noticed by McLaren via an exhibition at the Photographers’ Gallery. Whilst Earl was often derided for an over-commercial hook on his pictures (not enough like art, said his tutors), it was this approach — together with a generous slice of old-fashioned right-time-right-place luck — that would effectively set Earl up in business for life. It’s a great example of one man’s insistence on doing exactly what he wants proving ultimately successful.
And Earl has stuck firmly to his guns ever since, even when this meant a steadfast rejection of all things digital up until 2005. Only in the last couple of years has Earl considered digital technology to have come of age, and in typical style he’s grabbed the opportunity with both hands. Earl explains: “Until recently, I was never really sure whether digital capture was going to deliver exactly what I needed — whether the blacks would be black enough; whether I’d be able to enlarge the files in the way I wanted. But then the technology got to a point where it was clearly better than film”.
Suddenly a whole world of possibilities opened up. He continues: “I’ve been in this business for more than 25 years, and the last 12 months have been the most exciting time. With the development of Aperture and the continuing refinement of digital capture itself, I’m in control and I don’t have to depend on a lab to make it ‘right’. When I’m delivering images to clients, I know exactly what they’re getting — it’s all in one place and there are no third parties involved”.
Once Earl experienced the practical benefits of working with Aperture, he was convinced that the time was right to ‘go digital’. He explains: “Previously, it might have cost me a couple of hundred quid in processing, scanning, printing and retouching just to know whether the picture was ‘the one’. With Aperture I can process, edit and adjust — and then potentially abandon — an image in a matter of seconds. The speed of working like this is amazing. I can have a creative idea, carry it out and discover whether it’s worked or not without spending a whole load of time, energy and money in the process”.
