Marking Tricky’s 55th birthday, a little throwback to a photographic feature I compiled for the launch issue of MOJO Collections magazine in Winter 2000.
The premise was a simple one. Call up a gaggle of photographers and ask them to submit a photo (for free, cheekily) from their archive and get them to talk about it.
Ten did, one refused (“They need it,” Anton Corbin told me of the others in his typical no-nonsense Dutch way, ironically the only person I contacted who’d shot me himself four years prior).
Nestled on page 105 betwixt Marianne Faithfull (Gered Mankowitz) and Morrissey (Jill Furmanovsky) was Dennis Morris’s dazzling street art-strewn snap of the man born Adrian Thaws, circa 1996; his trademark sculpted dreadlocks shrouded by a cheap cherub-daubed scarf.
We called the feature Well Hung and didn’t even mention BBC once.
Onwards and upwards.
“This session was for Rock & Folk, the biggest pop magazine in France. It was done on a street in Monmartre, Paris. I didn’t particularly want to do a studio session and I knew that the graffiti background existed, so after I met with Tricky in a café, it was just a question of finding exactly where it was. It was all done really quickly – I like to work fast. Capture the moment. We just went for it. The nylon scarf I bought there.
“I was a great fan of his music – I felt he was able to bare his soul. And he liked the photos so much that he took them all and wouldn’t give them back! He suddenly got himself an apartment in New York and it took me a year to get them back from him.”
Numerous other credits include Steel Pulse, Linton Kwesi Johnson, PiL and Marianne Faithful, most famously for the Broken English LP cover.
He has recently been working with The Prodigy’s Maxim, and has just photographed a real-life crucifixion in the Philippines. A major retrospective exhibition of his work is planned for London in 2001.
Dennis has also found further success by publishing some of his best-known work in book form: see Bob Marley – A Rebel Life (Plexus, 1998) and Destroy – Sex Pistols 1977 (Creation, 1998).
Steve Pafford
