“’Ere, what’s that clicking noise?”
The first gallery exhibition for Welsh-born, US-based portrait photographer, Chalkie Davies, opens at SNAP in London on Saturday 15 March 2014.
Titled Chalkie Davies Goes Click (at Snap), the collection includes a few pictures he took of Bowie between 1973 and 1986.
Here’s a bit from him regarding the Absolute Beginners photo session…
“When Julien Temple made his film of Absolute Beginners he asked me to take photos of all the cast members and I spent a week on the movie set taking portraits of all the actors. As well as appearing in the film, David Bowie had written the title song, and was going to make a video to promote it. The record ended up at number two on the single charts. The video was shot in a variety of locations around The Embankment of the Thames and although I had many great images from the video, David and I felt that we should shoot a special photo for the cover.
We set up our lights near the Houses of Parliament and waited for a break in the filming, but, not surprisingly, they were running late and we ended up taking the photo just as Big Ben chimed midnight. Given the time restriction, the photographs were done very quickly, but working with David is so easy that we only needed to shoot two rolls of film.
On seeing the contact sheets, there was one frame where he had this big smile, but his publicist told me that he would not approve it as he never smiled on his record covers. However, when we want through the photos together, David agreed that there was something special about this frame, and agreed for it to be used. To this day it’s the only time he ever smiled on a cover.”
Running from Saturday 15 March to Saturday 26 April 2014, the exhibition celebrates Chalkie Davies’s music photographs from the 1970s and 80s and is a prequel to a major museum show of his work at the National Museum of Wales in Cardiff in 2015.
The gallery opens at 11.00am and Chalkie will be at there from 2 pm – 6pm onwards on the opening day of the exhibition, Saturday 15 March 2014.
All are welcome to go along and meet him and hear some of his stories behind these images.
Scroll for more images and read more about Chalkie Davies Goes Click (at Snap), here.