Preview: Steve Gullick - Kraak
Every great picture tells a story, but few have such surreal or hilarious origins as Steve Gullick’s shot of Spiritualized’s Jason Pierce.
Rock photographer Gullick photographed Pierce up Mount Etna just as it was erupting.
“Everything about that photograph was amazing, from the environment even down to the circumstances in which we decided to do it,” says Gullick.
“I’d lost most of my camera equipment at the airport and Jason had to walk up the mountain with this massive spacesuit on.
“We shouldn’t even have been able to get anywhere near the mountain because it was erupting, but the police saw him in his suit, though he looked like a scientist and waved us through.”
That picture and many others from Gullick’s career – from his first professional shoot with Jane’s Addiction frontman Perry Farrell back in 1988 – go on display at Kraak today.
Coventry-born Gullick made a name for himself in the 1990s as a photographer for the NME and Melody Maker – for which he documented the grunge invasion – before setting up two anti-establishment music glossies: Careless Talk Costs Lives and Loose Lips Sink Ships.
For this exhibition, he has picked out iconic and definitive shots: among them Mark E Smith gurning in Sheffield, a haunted portrait of New Yorker Patti Smith, Welsh band Super Furry Animals drowning in AAA tour passes in Spain and Seasick Steve performing on stage in Norfolk.
Steve says he doesn’t come from an arty background (“My parents inspired me personally and ethnically,” he says, “but they weren’t arty. When my parents were growing up, leisure time was about two hours on a Sunday”) but his passion for photography was nurtured by a teacher who installed a darkroom in his school.
Marrying that with a love for music, Steve got his first foot on the career ladder when he was invited to show shots to the now defunct Sounds magazine.
He found his way into the job shooting live music, but his style was not shaped by other music photographers. Instead, Steve’s noir approach grew out of a love for the work of war photographer Don McCullin, whose images are currently showing at the Imperial War Museum North.
“I’m a product of that early influence,” he says. “Don was famed for his dark shadows. I’m attracted to dark imagery. My style is reportage, really – I could have spent my career following firemen around but I don’t know who would have paid me to do that.”
Work at the show is available to buy on request, but the installation is as much an opportunity for visitors to relive the moments Steve has captured on a massive scale.
“The joy of this exhibition for me is I get to see my images as big prints rather than just a picture in a magazine. It’s just lovely to be able to show the pictures.”
Kraak, Stevenson Square, until March 27, 2010. Steve leads a guided talk of the exhibition on March 27 (booking essential via stevegullick@live.com).
Published: Fri, 12 March, 2010
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