Jill Furmanovsky

Hello all! I hope you’re keeping safe and well.    

All’s fine with me but I’m really struggling to find the motivation to pick my camera up. Hence the lack of Blips. Almost a year into working from home, my life seems to have become very pared-down and my ‘real life’ contact with other human beings - M aside - has reduced to practically zero over the winter months/during this current lockdown. I really miss having the ability to interact with people and to photograph them in person, not just via a video link. I know I should make more of an effort to turn my hand to other subjects, but my heart just isn’t in it to the same extent.

I’m resorting to a Zoom-based Blip today though, as I want to celebrate the photography of the great Jill Furmanovsky, one of the people who first sparked my interest in portraiture, live music photography and all things cool! She’s photographed everyone from Pink Floyd to Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen to The Clash, BB King to Björk, and her punk era photos really grabbed my attention when I was first getting seriously into music. You can see a great selection of her classic shots at www.rockarchive.com/photographers/jill-furmanovsky

Today, I spent my lunch break listening to Jill give a talk about her career and her current mission to ensure that classic rock photography is properly archived. And I even got to ask her a rather rambling question about whether she thinks music photography, as we’ve known it, has any sort of future as a career path these days - in the wake of Covid-19 and the impact it’s had on live performances; Brexit and its impact on touring musicians; and the rise and rise of social media and easy access to photography for all via smart phones. She has no problem with smart phones as cameras but does hate their ubiquity at gigs, and she feels the jury is still out on all the rest of it... although she thinks it’s very difficult to earn enough to live on as a music photographer these days even without the current situation.

Today’s picture shows Jill apparently attempting, quite rightly, to remove my reflection from my laptop screen as she speaks!

For today’s musical selection I could pick hundreds of songs by people that Jill has photographed over the last 50 years but I’m going with The Undertones, because whose day isn’t improved by a blast of ‘Teenage Kicks’? https://youtube.com/watch?v=PinCg7IGqHg