One of the most iconic images of the 70's is the album cover of the 1973 "Aladdin Sane", this album was to springboard the then not that well known David Bowie truly into the spotlight.
The original image was created in February 1973 by photography legend Brain Duffy with make up artist Pierre LaRoche at Duffy's studio in London. The post production artwork was by Phil Castle, it was Bowie's manager Tony Defries who believed if a the project was very expensive then the record label (RCA) would be more inclined to to ensure they got their investment back in record sales, and as they say the rest is history. The image was created from film negative using a very expensive colour transfer process which produced very strong and consistent colour reproduction.
It was my intention for my own project of recreating this image to be as true to the original as possible in it's appearance. However the model is obviously female, because although I could have possibly of found a male Bowie look alike, I also liked the idea of this being more of a beauty image, so approached it this way.
The original colour processing would have been very exact, but 39 years on there are many internet images with different variations in colour, mainly down to poor colour management and the quality of the digital file Below is my image side by side with one of these internet images for some comparison:
For those wanting to know the full technical stuff, for my image the capture was with a Hasselblad H1 camera with a 80 mm lens and Phase One P25 + digital back. The lighting was continuous (please see my earlier article on beauty lighting for more information on this). The post production was in Capture One and then into Photoshop to get the fade out on the body, the enhancement of the tear and also total removal of the models eyebrows, some skin smoothing and colour adjustments were also applied, but other than this the image isn't greatly changed from the captured one.
Here is a look behind the scenes at the make up process:
As I have previously said the intention was to produce one image that was true to the the the album cover, but we did try out some other looks and my model Jan came up with this pose which I thought was a very strong image and one for further post production in the future :
Also when I was researching how this iconic image was captured, I found that there was a considerable number of black and white contact sheet images from this shoot, which I found quite surprising as clearly the image strength is in it's strong colours.
The images in monochrome do give a very different feel to the things and it would be interesting know what Duffy's thoughts where as these appear to be deliberate b/w negatives rather than a Polaroid image just to see what he would be getting on the colour film. If anyone knows I would be interest to hear from them.
The ease of digital processing means that I too can look at monochromatic options for these images:
Hopefully reading this blog article has encourage you to have a go at creating one of your own favorite iconic images. In doing this the decision you need to make quite early on, is whether you are going to use the image as a catalyst to develop new images/ideas for yourself loosely based on the original or whether you are going to try and be as true as you can to original. Once you have decided this you can then plan your shoot accordingly.
Part of the fun for me was the research and the understanding of photographic processes and the historic components I hope you have similar fun.
Marc;-)
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