Starmaker and starman

Following so soon after the death of Tom Stoddart, the passing of Mick Rock is another huge loss for photography. Rock was a rock star photographer in both senses: someone who shot the biggest stars in music and someone who was himself a larger-than-life character with an appetite for excess whose reputation and mythology preceded him.

In a short obituary published by Louder Than War, John Robb comments: "Mick was one of the key rock photographers whose images defined the seventies; classic shots that added art to image and made mortals into stars. Nearly every great band in that flamboyant period was brought to a hyper life by his shots that played with colour and composition and stand as eternal freeze frames of how to take a rock 'n' roll photo." It's an astute observation - Rock's work was critical in enabling musicians to create and cultivate their own image and establishing global icons, including David Bowie, Iggy & The Stooges, Queen, Lou Reed and Debbie Harry.

Do yourself a favour and pick up a copy of Exposed. You'll be stunned at how many famous photos (some of them album covers) were the product of Rock's camera - and the book also proves that he continued to take fantastic photos long after the 1970s were over. (Though I can't condone the positioning of a picture of Sonic Youth power couple Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon opposite one of bloody Kasabian...)

Here's Rock writing in the Introduction: "I love the camera and its magical reflections. ... I love the access it gives me to an endless stream of imagery. I love the whole process involved in a session: gathering the elements, stirring the juices, finding the focus, building the energy, exploring and expanding all the possibilities within each individual circumstance. It charges my batteries like nothing else. Something happens inside of me - a kind of transformation. I enter the magic garden of the frame. I become the other, the image-maker, and everything is possible. It's intensely therapeutic." The passion for his profession and connection to the artform couldn't come across more strongly.

The last line of Andrew Loog Oldham's Afterword now reads like a fitting epitaph: "a brighter light in a very dark room".