IT’S a brave man who chooses to make his living photographing people notorious for their volcanic tempers and vast egos. But rock photographer Max Dodson wouldn’t have it any other way. ‘Yes,’ he concedes, ‘musicians do have big egos, and sometimes they don’t want to work with you… but I like that. I love the creative freedom that rock’n’roll gives you to do what you want.’
Dodson says the secret to rock portraiture, as with any other portraiture, is to know your subjects and shoot them at their most natural. ‘It is imperative to get to know them. I’ve been working with Irish band The Thrills since they started (Dodson also directed their debut video for ‘One Horse Town’) and they are like family now. Once you have that level of trust you can ask them to do anything. For their latest campaign I kept it very simple: some reportage stuff in the Vancouver studio where they made their new album ‘Teenager’, and another session outdoors on the streets of Paris.’ It is, he says, simply a question of capturing the moment. But that’s often easier said than done. As a photographer who insists only on using old-fashioned film (he never uses digital), he may not know if he’s caught that moment until he picks up his negatives from the lab. But that’s part of the thrill: ‘I just love the whole process. You hope you got the cover shot but you don’t know until later. There is no substitute for the unexpected surprise of finding a great shot when you are looking through the loop.’
Dodson left school in London at 17 to take a photography course, but believes ‘you can’t be taught how to take a picture – you have to go out and take one’. Seduced by rock’n’roll from an early age, he began taking pictures on a Leica M6 and found his way to Los Angeles, working as an assistant to commercial photographer Mark Kayne – ‘he let me shoot Heidi Klum in my lunch break’ – before a spell with Herb Ritts.
Then followed a stint in fashion, living in Paris and making test cards for wannabe models for the Viva agency. ‘I had the best time and learned a lot, but I knew I wasn’t right for fashion – everything is so contrived. I love working with talented artists – not models selling a product.’
His first rock session – for Interview magazine – was with Joni Mitchell (‘still the highlight of my career’), and he got his big break with the iconic cover shot for Richard Ashcroft’s solo album, Human Conditions. ‘I shot him in Barcelona on the Formula 1 race track with no assistant and I was literally shaking. But we ended up with a great cover.’ Dodson says his dream subjects would be Springsteen and Dylan, and his favourite photo is Jim Marshall’s famous shot of Johnny Cash at San Quentin prison in 1969, flipping his middle finger at the camera (when a British TV crew got in his way). ‘It just sums up the rebellious spirit of rock’n’roll.’
Conor Deasy of The Thrills describes life on the other side of the lens: ‘In rock’n’roll an image can be very potent. One little moment caught on film – like that Johnny Cash picture that Max loves, or Joe Strummer on the cover of The Clash’s London Calling – can do more for a band than any number of interviews. It might take a lot of shoots to get it, but when you do that great shot hangs around and keeps turning up again and again in magazines, or becomes a cover shot. That’s what you strive for. Of course, the shoots can be a bit tedious, especially with early calls, photographers you don’t know and ideas you don’t like. We once lost a magazine cover because we refused to wear Santa hats. And the one thing we always refuse to do is jump – photographers are always asking us to jump off walls, but you end up looking like something out of Spitting Image. When you know and like the photographer you know something good will come out of it, so you’re willing to get on with it. At this stage Max is very much a friend of the band, so there is a lot of camaraderie and banter. It’s never an ordeal or a chore, and I think you can see that in the best photos he’s done of us. “One more roll” is his catch-phrase… There was a time when we used to believe him!’
TIM COOPER IS MUSIC EDITOR AT CONTEMPORARY