The sad news of Tim Curry’s death made me remember his wonderful, over-the-top performance in The Rocky Horror Picture Show — and the photographs of Mick Rock, who captured Curry and so many of the artists of that era. And then one memory led to another… the clothes, the colors, the record covers, the photos! They made people like Curry, Bowie, or Queen look larger than life.

Today we see most photographs as thumbnails on a smartphone. Back then, some of the pictures we knew best were on LP covers. 

A standard 12-inch LP cover is roughly 31 × 31 cm. That’s quite a big photograph. 

At that size you see grain, focus, skin, light, and imperfections. The photograph had to be good enough to work at that size. And it wasn’t something you looked at for three seconds before scrolling to the next one. 

We spent time with these pictures. 

 I remember sitting with friends from school in our rooms listening to records. One person was reading the booklet, someone else was studying the cover, and we were talking while the record played. 

Of course, there were the typical vinyl cracks and pops. After a while you knew them as a part of the songs. The same went for the cover: a scratch or a worn corner were the imperfections that made that particular record your record. 

Today we stream identical digital files, and most of the time we don’t even own the copy we’re listening to. We simply have access to it. 

That’s quite a change.

Photographers like Mick Rock didn’t just document the stars, they helped to create the mythos around them, and the way we remember them. 

His photograph for the cover of Queen II became so closely connected with Queen that the band returned to the composition for the Bohemian Rhapsody video. His photographs of Bowie are a large part of the way we remember Ziggy Stardust. 

But when I look at Mick’s photographs today, something else happens. I’m thrilled by their quality, of course, and as a photographer I find plenty of inspiration in them. But I also think about old friends, the buddies I hung around with, rooms we sat in, and happy and sad moments from my own life. 

Most of those memories have nothing to do with Queen, Bowie, Tim Curry, or Mick Rock. But the pictures are somehow connected. 

Every generation has its own musicians and its own images. Mick captured many of the artists who influenced my generation, and the moments he photographed became part of the canvas on which I remember my own life.

And that brings me back to Tim Curry. 

Curry is gone. David Bowie is gone. Freddie Mercury is gone. Mick himself died in 2021. But in the photographs they haven’t aged a day. 

“Forever Young” inevitably comes to mind. And with Queen, so does “Who Wants to Live Forever”. Nobody does, of course. But photography has always had this strange relationship with time. A photograph keeps one tiny moment exactly where it was, while everything around it continues to change. 

Maybe that’s why these pictures mean more to us as we get older. We’re looking back at parts of our own lives as much as we’re looking at the people in them.

That’s why I was so proud that we could publish Mick Rock’s work in SilvergrainClassics Issue 16 — and especially proud to have Queen on our cover. 

These are pictures that deserve to be seen properly. Big enough to see the grain and the details, and on paper, where you can spend some time with them. 

Maybe there is a little nostalgia involved. That’s fine with me. 

Mick Rock — “The Man Who Shot the Seventies” — in SilvergrainClassics Issue 16.