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Wednesday, November 05, 2008
Henry Diltz Helped To Invent Rock Photography. An Exhibition Of His Work Starts In Sydney This Month. By Brian Wise
These days digital cameras make taking a photograph seemingly easy. Point, shoot, download it onto your computer or disc. Now we take thousands of pictures but how many of them are actually any good? Go back through your last lot of snaps and consider the composition of each photo, then compare them to the work of someone like Henry Diltz, a man who helped to elevate rock photography to an art form.
As someone who attends a few music festivals and takes a few thousand snaps over the course of the year, I am full of admiration for people such as Diltz - even more so when I consider the body of his work over the years. It is bloody hard to get a good photo, almost impossible to get a great one. But for decades Diltz has been capturing images that live with us and are burned into our brains.
“It’s sort of a retrospective of my life,” says Henry of a forthcoming exhibition of his work at Blender Gallery in Sydney. He reels off a list of names that sounds like a Who’s Who of West Coast rock in the ‘60s and ‘70s. It even includes shots of Keith Richards and the New Barbarians taken during a three-week stint when he joined the band on the road - and survived.
Henry Stanford Diltz is now 70 years old and, but for a quirk of fate and the craziness of Phil Spector, might have pursued either a briefly successful, or lonely and bitter, life as a folk musician. He describes his distinguished career in photography as an ‘accident.’
A member of the Modern Folk Quartet, which released two albums in ’63 and ’64, Henry once envisaged a career in music. (We all know what happened to the folk boom). Phil Spector didn’t take a gun to Henry but his intervention was just as effective.
“One summer we recorded a single with Phil,” recalls Henry. “It was with the Wall of Sound and everything. We were so excited that our career was suddenly going to take off and then he never put the single out because he was paranoid about putting out anything that wouldn’t be Number One for sure.
“Two of the guys in the group went back to Hawaii and said, ‘Call us if anything happens’ and we took a break that gave me the time to get into photography.”
“You never know about the old road not taken thing,” muses Henry when I suggest that he might have had a career as a musician but for mad Phil. “The other thing is that if we had that single out and been one of those one hit wonders I would have been one of those guys on Where Are They Now?”
“On the road, we bought some funky cameras and had a photo shootout for about a month,” recalls Henry of his time in the group back in early 1966 before its untimely demise. “When we returned home it just happened that the pictures were transparencies so we decided to invite our friends over and have a slide show. That was my epiphany right there. When I saw those eight foot photos glowing on the wall I said, ‘Oh, my God, this is a whole new experience. From then on I wanted to take more and more pictures to show to my friends in slide shows.” 
Luckily for Henry, his friends just happened to include David Crosby, Stephen Stills, Mama Cass, Neil Young, Jackson Browne, Joni Mitchell – the usual crew of freeloaders hanging around Laurel Canyon back in that era. 
“I just had my camera with me all the time,” says Henry. “I was kind of obsessed with photographing everything that I saw. There weren’t many photographers then and they saw me more as a friend and a musician not as a photographer, so their guard was down. They didn’t really notice that I was capturing their soul!”
“It’s something that came naturally to me for some reason,” says Diltz. “Sometimes I say, well I’m a Virgo so I pay attention to detail. I guess I’m a visual guy. I must say that back in those days we were smoking a lot of God’s herb and that had something to do with it because it did open up your eyes, it did make you notice things like colours. I know that for me the framing was always the fun part.”
After Henry’s photos of Neil Young, Stephen Stills and the rest of Buffalo Springfield were published he realised that he might be able to actually make a living out of photography.
“Then it might have been David Crosby at a Renaissance Fair we had here,” he says. “I was just photographing all the people that I knew and saw.” 
Henry’s work increasingly appealed to the musicians who needed publicity and album cover shots. He became the official photographer at Woodstock, and at Monterey Pop and the Miami Music Festival, and has photographed some of the best-known album covers of all time.
One of my favourites is Jackson Browne’s debut self-titled album, usually referred to as Saturate Before Using. It is one of at least two cases of a Diltz cover assuming the original title (the other being Morrison Hotel). The story is related in the excellent DVD Under The Covers and it is still vivid in Henry’s memory.
“That is such a funny story,” he says and recalls how the Saturate Before Using logo, created by his art director partner Gary Burden, was placed on the front cover. “Jackson said, ‘You can’t put that there, they’re going to think that’s the title. ‘No they won’t,’ we said. ‘That’s just up there because it is on the water bag.’ Sure enough, they list it as Saturate Before Using.” 
In Under The Covers there is also an excerpt from a home movie made at a friend’s party in the early’70s. It features the very first performance ever of the Eagles. 
“They were standing in the corner playing ‘Witchy Woman’ over and over because they didn’t know many songs,” he laughs, “ and Gary had the foresight to film that but he didn’t have any money to develop the film afterwards and thirty years went by and he finally had it developed. Now it’s all grainy. It’s strange how things work out.”
The people featured in the film, many of whom were Henry’s subjects, give a clue as to what life must have been like in Laurel Canyon at the time.
“Absolutely,” agrees Henry. “At that party, sitting on the floor cross-legged and playing, were Joni Mitchell, Mama Cass, Jackson Browne, Mark Volman from The Turtles, Ned Doheny who had an album out on Asylum, the Eagles. It was quite an amazing thing.” 
Diltz is also co-founder of the Morrison Hotel Galleries in SoHo and the Bowery in New York City, and in La Jolla, California. The galleries are named after his most famous album cover.
“Young kids don’t know who Crosby, stills and Nash are, or the Eagles or Jackson Browne,” says Henry, “but when you say Morrison Hotel, they all know exactly what that is.”
“All of these albums covers happened kind of by accident,” he continues. “The Doors wanted us to do their cover but they had no title, no idea of what to do. As we were talking Ray Manzarek said, ‘You know, my wife and I were driving around downtown LA the other day and we saw this place and it said Morrison Hotel.’ We thought that was great and immediately picked up on it. I’m surprised they didn’t say that right away. We went down there and looked at it and it looked great.”
Henry went back with the group two days later but the front desk clerk wouldn’t let them shoot inside. Waiting outside, Henry noticed the clerk leave the desk and get in the elevator and rushed the group indoors, shot one roll of film and as he says, ‘That was it!’
Henry Diltz is still active, and even has a role as contributing photographer to The Henry Rollins Show. I am sad to say that his many hints during our interview have done nothing to improve my photography but I look forward to seeing the exhibition of his brilliant work!
California Dreaming: A Retrospective will be exhibited at Blender Gallery in Paddington from November 20 – December 23.
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