“He was an actual innovator,” says Martin Parr, remembering fellow British photographer and longtime pal, Brian Griffin, who died at dwelling in London final weekend, aged 75. “He actually livened up the entire world of portraiture. They [his portraits] had been so recognisably his. Nobody had ever seen something like them. And never many photographers can say that.”
Griffin is greatest identified for his iconic album covers, reminiscent of Depeche Mode’s A Damaged Body (1982) and Joe Jackson’s Look Sharp (1979), however he was rather more than a rock photographer, injecting surreal narrative and noir lighting into business and editorial commissions, whereas pursuing his personal tasks. Griffin made no distinction between private and task work; he put equal power and ambition into each, all the time seeking to create some playful visible disruption and make lasting, significant images.
He grew up within the Black Nation within the English Midlands, attributing the sights and sounds of heavy business as a significant affect upon his imagery.
Griffin gave up a job at British Metal on the finish of the Sixties to review images at Manchester Polytechnic, the place he met Parr and Daniel Meadows. Afterwards, he moved to London to start his storied freelance profession, taking a portfolio of images of ballroom dancers to Roland Schenk at Administration At the moment. The celebrated Swiss artwork director instantly noticed his potential and inspired the younger photographer’s flights of creativeness in probably the most unlikely setting of company portraiture.
His private documentary work featured in landmark exhibitions within the Nineteen Seventies, when Britain’s artwork institution started taking images severely, together with Hayward Gallery’s first main survey of up to date follow, Three Views (1979). The Nineteen Eighties had been, nevertheless, his undoubted peak. Certainly, the Guardian hailed him “the photographer of the last decade”. A lot of his most well-known photographs of musicians (Kate Bush, Siouxsie Sioux and Elvis Costello, to call however a couple of) had been made throughout this time, as was his most memorable large-scale fee, celebrating the completion of the Broadgate venture within the Metropolis of London.
He was broadly recognised for Work, printed in 1988, one among many typically self-published books he produced all through his profession. And following an exhibition on the Rencontres d’Arles images competition in 1987, alongside the primary displaying of Nan Goldin’s Ballad of Sexual Dependency exterior the US, dozens extra exhibits adopted, at dwelling within the UK and throughout Europe.
All through the Nineties, Griffin labored primarily as a director of TV commercials and music movies, returning to images in 2002 and selecting up the place he left off, taking pictures memorable campaigns for Reykjavik Power, the completion of the HSI railway, town of Marseilles, and a prized fee for the London Olympic Video games in 2012. And among the many dozens of books and exhibits he produced over the previous 15 years, there have been retrospectives within the UK, Iceland, Italy and Georgia. In 2021 he printed what was to be the primary half of his autobiography, Black Nation Dada, designed by Cafeteria, with whom he was planning on doing the second half later this yr.
“This outstanding technology got here out of Manchester Polytechnic, which included Brian and Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows,” says the collector and gallerist James Hyman, who based the Centre for British Images. “And the three of them have been completely elementary, of their other ways, within the improvement of British images over a 50 yr interval. He is acquired a central place in that historical past, and he was additionally a really particular person voice.”