SHOOT YOUR SHOT
Teenage camera prodigy DENNIS MORRIS’s pics of Bob Marley, PiL and more sear the page, half a century on. A sneak peek at his new book, Life + Music, hypnotises DANNY ECCLESTON.
IT WOULD HAVE BEEN EASY FOR Bob Marley to dismiss the 13-year-old hustling him for pictures outside London’s Speakeasy club in the spring of 1973. So why didn’t he?
“Bob was used to taking young people seriously,” muses that 13-year-old today, sat in a west London hotel bar, super-cool in transparent specs frames of his own design. “In Trenchtown I saw kids of eight, looking at me, thinking, ‘I can take you any time.’ They’re already having to provide for the family.”
Jamaica-born, Hackney-raised Dennis Morris was already bewitched by the camera, capturing intimate aspects of his Anglo-West Indian community and running a nascent photography business out of his family’s flat. His Marley encounter became a whirlwind road trip with The Wailers (which earned him a hiding from his stepfather), then a lifelong relationship with the reggae guru that bloomed into a career in music photography, in the record industry, and in art and design.
Subsequent eye-popping shots of the Sex Pistols, Jamaican reggae artists and Public Image Limited prompted an offer to join Island Records as Art Director. “They asked me, ‘What car would you like?’ Morris recalls. “I thought for a minute and said, I’d like a Porsche. Then I got home and remembered, I can’t fucking drive!”