Wednesday, March 06, 2024

Cover story

It's often said that everyone who attended the Sex Pistols' 1976 gig at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall formed a band. An apocryphal tale - but perhaps there was something in the Mancunian water, as it seems as though a few years earlier everyone who studied photography at Manchester Art School went on to become a star of the medium: Martin Parr, Daniel Meadows, Brian Griffin.

As Greg Whitmore's obituary for the Guardian underlines, Griffin came to straddle the worlds of photography and music, responsible for iconic album covers for Depeche Mode and Echo & The Bunnymen (among others) and striking portraits of numerous musicians, having branched out from his work in the corporate world. 

This selection of his images published by the BBC is astonishing, illustrating his aptitude for composition and lighting - and a reminder of how good it would have been at the Northern Eye Festival three years ago to hear the man named by the Guardian in 1989 as the photographer of the decade talk about his practice in person.

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