Jill Furmanovsky

You can buy a poster sized print by
Jill Furmanovsky at Rockarchive.com
for only £1800. She's known as a photographer of rock bands and has been working for over 30 years. This is what is called an 'environmental portrait' - it's a portrait of Noel Gallagher. Even if you had never heard of him, you'd know that he's fascinated by guitars because the photograph shows the environment that tells us about the subject. The story behind the picture is that Gallagher, like many guitarists on tour, went straight to the nearest guitar shop - like kids in a sweet shop. Jill the photographer went with him, because she was photographing the band on tour. He was remembering how Johnny Marr (from the Smiths) gave him a guitar when he was young and broke, but he could now buy any of the guitars in the shop.
Jill got her big break by getting the job of in-house photographer at the Rainbow Theatre in London, which was a major venue for bands. She had been training as a photographer for two weeks.
Two weeks! That's just annoying, but she was probably very very good. She won the Jane Bown portrait award, which gives us a link to one of our other photographers.
The pictures she took with Oasis were published in a book called, "Was There Then."
The style shows shallow depth of field and soft window light, and the frame is completely filled with guitars foreground to background. The only thing breaking up the line of guitars is Noel himself, the guitarist, bathed in light and occupying an off-centre position. It's also black-and-white, obviously, and will have been shot on film. It has quite a contrasty, punchy look, with rich blacks and clean whites. This is a style that is typical of photo-journalism, and comes from using films that are very light sensitive - for example Kodak Tri X Pan film, at 400 iso, giving a punchy, slightly grainy look.
Nowadays, even when we shoot digitally, this is often the 'look' that we try to achieve.

Oasis had a musical style that copied the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, and Jill Frurmanovsky had a photography style that was inspired by Annie Liebowitz, whose career got underway when she went on tour with the Rolling Stones.

She photographed everything, onstage and backstage, and also joined in with the lifestyle. Keith Richards was surprised to see that she was still there, after a few weeks, when most people who joined the band couldn't last the pace.

These pictures are also black-and-white, quite gritty and grainy, because very light sensitive film consists of large clumps of silver, allowing the photographer to work quickly in poor light. The punchy, grainy quality is often thought to be very visually appealing, and when anyone talks about a documentary or photo journalistic 'style', this is often what they mean. Another term is 'fly-on-the-wall'. Because it looks like you are not interfering or changing anything, but recording and seeing everything that happens.

Annie Liebowitz became a major photographer for Rolling Stone magazine, and Vanity Fair, and has created some of the most famous pictures of celebrities. Those magazines usually have a cover photograph that has as much impact as possible, in full colour, so Liebowitz changed her style from the gritty, black-and-white documentary style to carefully controlled colour portraits.

These are often photographed in a studio with lots of lights, or even on location out doors, also with a lot of flash units arranged to create controllable lighting. An Annie Liebowitz portrait session with a film star is a big event, and has a lot in common with filming a scene from a movie: lots of lights, make-up artists, assistants and art directors.

Her picture of John Lennon and Yoko Ono  became very well-known. It shows how plans can go wrong, but the result goes right. It was to be a cover shot for Rolling Stone magazine of John Lennon on his own, but he insisted that Yoko should be included. One version of the story goes that she wanted both to be semi-clothed but Yoko refused.

So thinking on her feet, she tried to recreate the 'Double Fantasy' album cover with Yoko clothed and Lennon naked, and the resulting picture was unexpected, but more effective and powerful than anyone had anticipated. It was also the last photograph taken of John Lennon, which makes it poignant and historically significant.