Mick Rock is The Man Who Shot the Seventies, but he doesn't like the term—and he doesn't much like being called an icon, either. "All that means is I'm getting old," he tells me on a phone call from his home in Manhattan. But these things tend to stick: His photographs have captured and defined music for the past forty years, including David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust phase and Lou Reed's post-Velvets career. Rock's photos adorn the covers of Iggy and the Stooges' Raw Power and Queen's Queen II, and he was there when the glam scene that he'd shot in such ecstasy started to harden and debase itself, as well as when Motley Crue signalled their own turn from underground sex clubs to coke-fueled strip joints. Recently, he's shot Father John Misty, Janelle Monáe, and Karen O. Whether you knew it or not, you've seen his work.SHOT! the Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock, Barney Clay's documentary on the London-born photographer produced by VICE Films, takes on Rock's career chronologically—London to New York, glam to punk, decadence to addiction to eventual recovery—but continually circles back to Rock's near-death experience in 1996, when a bout with cocaine left him sputtering and in need of a quadruple heart bypass surgery. He loved cocaine so much that he shot a series of still-life photographs in the early 80s with the drug as his subject; the photos are quite beautiful, but nobody can keep that lifestyle up.Continue reading on Noisey.
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