061 - Brian Griffin
© Brian Griffin
Brian Griffin was born in Birmingham in 1948 and grew up in the neighbouring Black Country, in the English midlands. He started his working life at 16 working in a factory, where he remained for 5 years, before finally making his escape to Manchester Polytechnic where he took a degree in photography, shortly after which he left for London in pursuit of a photographic career as a fashion photographer. It was there that he met and was mentored by Roland Schenk, the charismatic art director on Management Today magazine, who offered him a job as a corporate photographer. The rest, as they say, is history.
Brian was later considered 'the photographer of the decade' by the Guardian Newspaper in 1989; 'the most unpredictable and influential British portrait photographer of the last decades' by the British Journal of Photography in 2005 and 'one of Britain’s most influential photographers' by the World Photography Organisation in 2015. In 1991, his book Work was awarded the ‘Best Photography Book in the World’ prize at Barcelona Primavera Fotografica. Brian is patron of the Format Photography Festival in Derby; in September 2013, he received the ‘Centenary Medal’ from the Royal Photographic Society in recognition of a lifetime achievement in photography; and in 2014 he received an Honorary Doctorate from Birmingham City University.
Brian Griffin’s photographs are held in the permanent collections of many major art institutions and he has published twenty or so books, including his latest, Pop which features some of the highlights of his album artwork and band photography from decades working in the music industry with such artists as Iggy Pop, Elvis Costello, Depeche Mode and Kate Bush.
In other words, he’s a bit of a legend.
On episode 061, Brian discusses, among other things:
The new book Pop and who will buy it
His books not selling in the past
Five years of factory work
Nearly becoming a communist
His mentor Roland Shenck
The influence of Expressionism
Asking Margaret Thatcher to “dance like Isadora Duncan”
His current First World War project
“I was determined from day one that I would always plow my own unique furrow really and never fall into the trap of earning loads of money by applying myself to what they desired, so I’d be like any other photographer. I decided I was never gonna do that…”
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