Solo Bowie 8

The Bowie portrait was taken from a session in Paris at a photographic studio close to the recording studio that David Bowie was using to record his ‘Pin Ups’ album. I had gone to Paris specifically to photograph Twiggy & Bowie together for Vogue as the first picture of a man and woman featured on the cover.

David loved the picture so much, he asked if it could be used as his next album cover. I asked him how many albums did he think he’d sell? “At least a million” was the reply. Well, I knew that Vogue would shift at the most 80,000 copies, which would be on the stands for only a month.

It was an easy decision to make: Vogue was furious, but I’d always retained copyright of my own pictures!

A month or so later I was driving along the ‘Sunset Strip’ in Los Angeles when to my amazement I spotted a 60ft hoarding displaying my photograph as the cover of ‘Pin Ups’ It was worth the fall out with Vogue.

A few people have wondered why I had a make-up artist paint masks on Bowie & Twig’s faces. The reason was that Twiggy and myself had just returned from a tropical island and were as brown as berries. Bowie was his usual Thin White Duke pale as a sheet. The masks balanced the obvious skin colour clash whilst remaining enigmatically strange.

Over the years, many people have assumed that it was Angie, David’s lunatic wife at the time, on the cover with Mr Bowie when it was in fact M’selle Twiggy!

Incidentally, the first Vogue cover portraying a man and a woman (they obviously liked my idea) was published a few months later with Ryan O’Neal and Marisa Berenson!