“He was very polite,” says Gerald Fearnley, who took these photographs of 20-year-old David Bowie in 1967. “I don’t remember how he ended up in my studio, but I was probably the only person he knew with a camera and a studio.” Gerald Fearnley’s photoshoot with David Bowie remained unpublished until now. Although one of Fearnley’s photos was used on the cover of Bowie’s debut album. It failed to chart. And when the label dropped him, Bowie took a break, re-emerging in 1969 with Space Oddity. At the time of these photos, Bowie was taking classes with the dancer, actor and mime artist Lindsay Kemp. “Mime is a marvellous medium,” Bowie told Melody Maker in 1969. “It requires a lot of concentration on the part of the audience.”
From: Bowie Unseen: Portraits of an Artist as a Young Man19 Jun 2017 by Gerald Fearnley
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