One subject, two great artists
It may cost $3000 a copy, but a new book by British photographer Derek Ridgers manages to turn singer Nick Cave from a braying donkey into a beautiful flamingo.
The cost of British photographer Derek Ridgers’s latest book – including a silver bromide print, admittedly – is close to 75 per cent of the average monthly wage in England and 50 per cent of the average amount spent on an engagement ring, an implausible sum until Ridgers’s importance as an artist is considered. Now 72, the elegant and sometimes taciturn Ridgers remains at the forefront of the field.
His portraits, which feature in the British National Portrait Gallery and have appeared on the covers of innumerable major publications, are, like those of Annie Leibowitz, impossible to forget. Rolling Stones’ guitarist Keith Richards, coldly evaluative through cigarette smoke. Actor Catherine Zeta-Jones, improbably luminous in a black slip, crushed into a shower stall. Or the late Formula One champion Ayrton Senna, resolute and distracted in the cockpit of his car.
“How I appraise my own work is always an area of difficulty,” Ridgers, who has never shared his subjects’ vanity, writes in the book.
“Sometimes it takes me years to see anything good about my photographs. Occasionally decades.”
While his iconography of internationally celebrated artists and writers, sportsmen and politicians, musicians and actors ranks among the most beautiful portraits ever taken – Gucci pursued Ridgers to shoot their range, and Saint Laurent features his work on their T-shirts – it is his documentation of the British underground fetish, music and nightlife scene during the 1980s and 1990s that established him as an icon. As hard-edged as the works of Weegee, as decisive as those of Henri Cartier-Bresson, and with the troubling latency of Helmut Newton’s erotic portraits, his photographs still have the stinging impact of a slap.
Ridgers’ genius for recording the unravelling edges of society is captured in volumes such as Photographs: Derek Ridgers, The Dark Carnival, and Skinheads 1979 – 1984, but … grace is the first book he has published focusing on a single subject: former Birthday Party and Bad Seeds frontman Nick Cave, now 65 and whose public image has, through marriage and the deaths of two of his four sons – seven years apart, through drug-related causes – undergone a species of Damascene conversion.
Rather than as a quasi-religious icon, Cave, for perhaps the first time, is revealed as a flamingo of sorts, posing and preening, meticulously styled – those arrays of roses on his shirt, that satin bomber jacket, the artful intensity with which he showcases his glittering eyes – for four shoots that span the years between 1984 and 1997.
Scanned directly from Ridgers’s original archival transparencies, these disquieting portraits of Cave have been printed by full colour lithography with the monochrome also being run as full colour to achieve high contrast. At times, they’re from the same contact sheets, creating initial confusion, as traditionally only a single shot – perhaps two – are selected from the one session.
And then the intimacy kicks in.
These are the portraits between the branded photo releases, the moments in which Cave can be seen addressing Ridgers as a mirror into which he must, rather than choose to, look. In one, the corner of his mouth twitches with disguised contempt; in another, his glance is informed with tutelary impatience. In itself, Ridgers’s focus invests him with meaning: Cave, who can look like a braying donkey – I both interviewed and reviewed him during the documented period – is invested with a malevolent beauty. The evolution of Cave’s investment is also revealing. In the earlier portraits, Cave is uncertain in his posturing. His awareness of his need for Ridgers is evident in the intensity of his almost unbroken eye contact, but in the later ones, Cave is unflinching in his hostility.
During the intervening period, his aggression was ratified by financial success. In these later portraits, he mostly looks away, or graces Ridgers with practised ironic boredom. There are subjects who openly engage with photographers, seeking the establishment of a connection; such subjects produce an oeuvre of portraits unique to the photographers who shoot them, but in this respect, Cave is different. His most famous portraits, excluding the variable of confidence, are a master class in human darkness – anger, boredom, disgust, suspicion, rage. The consistency alone demonstrates that his interest lies in the promotion of a brand rather than collaboration with an artist of equal stature, which Ridgers remains.
It is perhaps Ridgers for whom this exquisitely produced volume – blue cloth bindings, gold foil blocked title, obsolete Heidelberg letterpress used to perforate one of the pages, and so on – is named. Far from being just another gallery for Cave fans, … grace is both a record of a musician of undeniable talent and an investment in the work of a man who will be remembered as one of the greatest photographers in history.
Antonella Gambotto-Burke’s new book, Apple: Sex, Drugs, Motherhood and the Recovery of the Feminine, can now be ordered.
… grace
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