Brian Griffin: Influential British photographer dies
Brian Griffin, widely acknowledged as one of the most prominent British photographers of his generation, has died aged 75.
Born in Birmingham, in 1948, Griffin studied photography, in Manchester, before starting work as a freelance photographer, in 1972.
His portraits for Management Today magazine playfully subverted conventional contemporary corporate photography.
“I took this photograph in 1974,” Griffin said.
“It was for an article about people commuting into London to work.
“I hailed a taxi and asked to be driven slowly across the bridge, while I took images through the cab’s back window.
“The inspiration was obviously Fritz Lang’s film Metropolis.”
Griffin’s later work graced many album covers.
His 1979 picture of writer Charlie Woods standing to attention after lighting a sky rocket on a grey misty day on Dungeness Beach, in Kent, was used many years later for the cover of Howard Jones’s album Cross that Line.
And his portraits of artists such as Ringo Starr, Iggy Pop, Peter Gabriel, REM, Depeche Mode and Queen, led the Guardian newspaper to name him photographer of the decade, in 1989.
New Musical Express (NME) named Echo & the Bunneymen’s Heaven Up Here, shot at Porthcawl beach, in Bridgend, best album cover of 1981, Rolling Stone magazine among the best ever.
Griffin was influenced by Renaissance painting, surrealism and German expressionist cinema.
But growing up and working in the industrial Midlands also helped define his aesthetic.
More than 20 monographs of Griffin’s work have been published.
It has been the subject of more than 50 international solo exhibitions and is held in collections at the;
- Victoria and Albert Museum
- National Portrait Gallery
- Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery
- Reykjavík Art Museum
- Mast Foundation, in Bologna
Griffin became the patron of Format Festival, in 2009, and received the Royal Photographic Society Centenary Medal, in 2013.
