Brian Aris is one of the UK's most acclaimed music and celebrity photographers whose archive dates back to 1965. During his esteemed career, he photographed David Bowie, Debbie Harry, George Michael, Annie Lennox, Tina Turner, Kate Bush, and the late Queen Elizabeth II, to name just a few.
Brian began his career as a photojournalist during the 1960s. Over the next nine years, a series of frontline assignments took him around the world - to cover the civil unrest and riots at the start of the troubles in Northern Ireland, the plight of Palestinian children in Jordan, and the tragic famine that raged across Africa. He also documented the war in Vietnam, where he worked until the final days of the conflict in Saigon.
In the late 1970s, Brian decided to move away from photojournalism and embark on a complete change of direction, so he opened a studio in London where he started photographing fashion and glamour models for newspapers and magazines. His work started to include musicians and one of the first sessions he undertook was photographing Debbie Harry from Blondie in 1977.
It was a shoot that hugely influenced his career. Brian recalled in an interview with The Independent in 2017, “That session really did convince me to continue photographing the pop stars that were emerging in England and America. But not for a minute could I imagine what was coming. From rock and roll to glam rock and punk and all the variations, the music business in London seemed to explode. And I was very privileged to be there at that time and have so many of those creative people stand in front of my lens."
Over time his studio work also began to include more pop and rock stars such as The Jam, The Clash, George Michael, Roxy Music and The Police and eventually Brian decided to concentrate full-time on documenting the music industry. During the next two decades, Brian Aris shot every aspect of the music scene from punk and rock ‘n’ roll right through to the emergence of boy bands and girl power.
A highlight of his career was when Brian was asked to take the exclusive official pictures of the all-superstar Band Aid line-up when they got together to record the record-breaking fund-raising hit single Do They Know It’s Christmas? to help the victims of the Ethiopian famine. He had been asked to take the pictures by Sir Bob Geldoff and later went on to shoot the Live Aid and Live8 concerts that followed. Brian was also commissioned to produce official portraits to mark the late Queen Elizabeth II's 70th birthday in 1996 and later in 1997 for her and Prince Philip's Golden Wedding Anniversary.
One of Brian's most notable bodies of work is the photographs he took of David Bowie between 1985 and 2000. These include backstage shots from Live Aid in 1985, photos of his marriage to Iman in 1992, and Bowie working with Tin Machine in Dublin in 1991. Brian said to The Independent, “I got to see the wonderfully modest and generous man behind the public image. He was a truly original talent and a great musician".
Brian Aris's extraordinary archive represents one of the largest individual photography collections in the UK. We are delighted to offer a selection of his limited edition prints for sale.
