Andy Earl

Andy Earl has been at the forefront of music photography since he graduated, when his first job was for 80's band Bow Wow Wow which ended him being arrested for showing the lead singer Annabella Lwin aged just fifteen, artistically nude as a parody of Edouard Manet's Le Dejeuner Sur l'Herbe (The Luncheon on The Grass). Andy started his talk of by talking about his time as a student where he developed a flash and a slow colour film to create a blur technique this later on lead him to create a music video for Rolling stones completely out of stills using 2 Nikon cameras. It seemed that this technique and the controversy surrounding the Bow Wow Wow incident were enough to kick start his career and he missed the assistant stage as he was having work thrown at him like Prince, Duran Duran's Rio cover and so on. 

Andy talked about various musicians he had photographed and mentioned stories on how Madonna was a nightmare to photograph and Courtney love turned up waisted, but it was the image that he did for Pink Floyd's the Delicate Sound of Thunder that interested me the most as the band have always had such strong imagery for their album covers, I mean an album cover that contains a man with light bulbs attached to his jacket whilst another is releasing several doves (which were waited so as not to have to take the picture first time) whilst the two men look like they are about to have a dual is always going to look good. 

Andy offered several pieces of advice firstly the History of Art is important like his parody of Manet's work, and this can be seen in many other photographers work especially that of early photography. To take risks but to also take a backup so if the risk doesn't pay off then you have a fall back point. To keep shooting like a pianist keeps practicing as to avoid getting rusty. 

He mentioned that there is more freedom in music photography than advertising and that your ideas are the selling point for the photographer in this industry which is why I think Andy's images do stick out compared to the majority of music photographers he isn't interested in just the band he is interested in making a really good image that as he Say's 'How can I say something?' Maybe this is why he stressing that the history of art is important. 

The final thing I want to mention about Andy is a story he told us about being commissioned by Cosmopolitan Magazine where he shot in the style of Cosmo, when he returned with the photographs they said they had commissioned you because of your style, which says that you should keep shooting in your style even if seems weird or take a back up as I mentioned earlier.