FEATURE:
Shot Like An Arrow Into the Killer Storm
PHOTO TITLE: ‘Hammer Horror’/ALL PHOTOS: Gered Mankowitz
Kate Bush and Gered Mankowitz
___________
THERE is a reason as to why…
PHOTO TITLE: ‘WOW!’
I am revisiting the relationship between Kate Bush and Gered Mankowitz. To be fair, one needs no reason to speak about them. Mankowitz is a legendary photographer who, among others, has shot Jimi Hendrix and The Rolling Stones. You can check out his work. I am coming back to the photographer, as he celebrates his seventy-fifth birthday next month. Even though he only worked with Bush for a fairly short period of time, it was at the start of her career. Bush had many photos of her taken between, say, 1978 and 1979. Many were press shots…but the one photographer who stands out from that time is Gered Mankowitz. I am going to bring in an interview shortly where he talked about Bush. Whilst I love a lot of the other shots that she was involved with through her career, the work with Gered Mankowitz is especially important and impressive. That early in her career, Bush would have been nervous and new to photoshoots. She had her photo taken by her brother, John (Carder Bush; he photographed his sister from childhood to as recently as 2011); working with anyone outside of the family was quite new. To establish trust would have been quite difficult. I am going to pepper a few of his photos through. He shot promotional images for Bush’s debut single, Wuthering Heights. His image would have been used for the U.K. cover.
PHOTO TITLE: ‘Hat’
However, a shot of her in a leotard revealed her nipples. It meant that there was discomfort putting out that image. Rather than trying to sexualise her, it was a raw and natural shot. It is one of the best images of Kate Bush. One can see the image on the Japanese cover for the debut album, The Kick Inside (where the nipples have been cropped). Mankowitz did shoot the cover for Kate Bush’s second album, Lionheart. There are some outtakes from that session which are fantastic. There are other photos Mankowitz took of Bush from 1978 and 1979. One of them, where Bush resembles a screen icon like Lauren Bacall, is one of her finest ever photos (at the bottom of this feature). Some photographers would do very similar shots. If you look at the ones Mankowitz shot of Bush, they are all different. From the earliest ones where Bush is in a leotard and it showcases her dancing side, to the more elegant photos, his work is remarkable! One can purchase a copy of WOW! It is a collection of stunning photos from 1978 and 1979. Just before coming onto an interview I was talking about earlier, I wanted to bring in Mankowitz’s recollections regarding the first couple of shoots with Kate Bush:
“Gered Mankowitz recalls: “The final few weeks of 1977 were very busy for me, with album covers for Bing Crosby, Cliff Richard, Shakin’ Stevens and the Rubettes amongst others. So when EMI asked me over to their Manchester Square offices in central London to discuss a new artist, I was actually a bit pushed to find the time. How glad I am that I did manage to free up my schedule, because at that meeting, they played me ‘Wuthering Heights’ and showed me the video they had produced of a then unknown singer called Kate Bush performing the song. Kate was not at this initial meeting, but from listening to the playback of the song and watching the video, I realised that she was an extraordinary artist and potentially a wonderful subject”.
January 1978 – The first session
“In those days I was working out of a studio in Great Windmill Street in the heart of London’s Soho. For this first session with Kate I had decided to use a wonderful piece of distressed canvas as a background; it had once been used as the floor of a boxing ring in the gym below us, and its coarse texture seemed a perfect contrast to Kate’s youthful beauty.
I purchased some leotards, tights, leg-warmers and scarves, and placed them in our rather inadequate dressing room, which was actually a curtained-off corner in the studio. When Kate arrived, she disappeared behind the curtain with the make-up artists and stylist.
Kate emerged in the pink leotard.
She looked beautiful, and I knew that we were going to have a fantastic session. She settled in front of my Hasselblad camera without a care in the world. Kate did not have much experience of working with a professional photographer, and I felt that it was important to try and guide her through the process. She had a natural instinct and seemed to understand immediately how much the camera loved her.
After shooting several test Polaroids, I was happy with the lighting, and Kate was delighted with the look. We shot throughout the afternoon, with Kate in both the pink outfit and a green version. After about twenty rolls of film, the first shoot was over and I felt certain that we had achieved the objective and produced the portrait that would launch her.”
March 1978 – The second session
My second session with Kate was on 21 March 1978. By this time, both the ‘Wuthering Heights’ single and The Kick Inside album had been established as huge hits. Some countries did not want to use the original Kick Inside cover image, and one of my jobs for this second session was to come up with some alternative options for use on covers outside the UK. One of these turned out to be the classic ‘wooden box’ image which became the American cover for the album, and there were at least four different cover images in total. I always loved the ‘wooden box’ series because it was such a complete contrast to the original pink leotard shoot and showed a more playful side of Kate’s character. We had the box made by my set-builder so that it was completely square and would fill the shape of the album sleeve perfectly.
The other reason for the second session was to create a stock of several different portraits that showed different aspects of Kate’s theatrical persona. I remember this as a long and pretty tiring session, and we shot more than six different set-ups and over forty rolls of film. When I look back at this shoot, and see again the variations that we covered in one day – including the entire ‘Wuthering Heights’ video sequence in the Cathy dress, minus the smoke (which EMI had asked for because they could not take stills from the video itself) I am not surprised that it was such a shattering experience”.
Although Bush had quite a bit of say and artistic control over her shoots, it is down to the photographer to get something unique from the subject. Gered Mankowitz’s photos of Bush in 1978 and 1979 are amazing! She can reveal so much without giving too much away. In 2014, Mankowitz was interviewed by The Big Issue for the release of WOW! I have selected a few portions of that interview:
“I was brought in to create the launch image for Wuthering Heights and I think what makes Kate brilliant is her unique talent, her extraordinary energy, her vision – everything she does has a tremendous vision.
I remember her to be somebody who worked very hard. She was very young, 19, when it came out and she was wonderful to work with. Very energetic, very frenetic, quite difficult to tie down sometimes, to get her to focus on making an idea work, she wasn’t very experienced in having her photograph taken at that time, which was part of the challenge. But her individuality shone through.
I don’t think I had to draw it out of her, it was there, it was bubbling out of her. When I first went to the record company to discuss the session she wasn’t there but they played the video of Wuthering Heights that they’d made. It was quite obvious that she was a unique and special talent, not just because the music was so extraordinary but because of her individual look, her beauty and movement and style.
She had a really special quality, which stood out instantly on record and visually. I knew that I had to be at the top of my game to produce an image that was going to complement and support this extraordinary talent, and that’s what I tried to do. I always try to break these things down so that they are as simple as possible.
I had to be at the top of my game to produce an image that was going to complement and support this extraordinary talent
I only had a very loose connection with the record company. They already had a cover for the album The Kick Inside, but they didn’t have an image of Kate, it was quite obscure and it wasn’t as up-front of Kate as they wanted it to be. But I sense that they weren’t quite sure where they were going with her.
What they seemed very certain of was here was a unique and special talent and that they had somebody who was pure gold, but they were being led by her and I think that they weren’t sure who they were getting.
I wouldn’t want to suggest that she was in control of our session, but she was very much in control of the way she looked when she stepped out of the dressing room and I saw her for the first time ready for the camera I was blown away and knew it was going to be something special.
We did the very famous leotard pictures. I chose the leotards to make visual link with dance, that was the point of choosing and selecting them, I wanted to keep it extremely simple, I hope that in the portrait there would be a visual connection with dance which was clearly very important to her.
PHOTO TITLE: ‘Cathy Come Home’
The Big Issue: There has been discussion over the years whether her sexuality was being exploited – depending how it’s cropped, it’s quite graphic…
Gered: It didn’t occur to me at that time that [the nipples visible in the full-length shot] would be a problem. I know that it was pretty edgy for the late ’70s but it wasn’t sort of discussed or thought about a great deal. That was how she looked and I wasn’t going to say to her “I think you should cover up”.
She looked absolutely gorgeous. I’m looking at a cropped version of it now and it still has all the power that it did then. Her breasts might have been titillating to a few young boys but her beauty and her serenity, her stillness are what really make this a special photograph.
But she used her sexuality throughout her performance – look at the Babooshka video or any of the records and promotional videos and stills, certainly in those first three or four years of her career she was a very sexual person and I think that came across in the way she moved, looked and the way she sang”.
On 3rd August, Mankowitz turns seventy-five. He is one of the most important photographers in terms of Bush’s images in 1978 and 1979. I love (as he does) the pink leotard shot. It is a shame that it was never used in the U.K. It is hard to pick a favourite - though I really like the 1979 shot where Bush looks like a Hollywood idol. Go and check out Mankowitz’s photos of Kate Bush, as they are so engaging and fabulous. It is left to me to nod to a legendary photographer. Even though it is not until August, I wanted to wish Gered Mankowitz…
PHOTO TITLE: ‘Hollywood’
A very happy birthday.