Festival inspires snapper to relive her purple patch

A PHOTOGRAPH of the rock icon Prince, which moved Henley Festival-goers to tears, is on display at the Hypergallery.

This weekend is the last opportunity to see pictures taken by photographer Zoe Wilson of artists such as Tina Turner, Whitney Houston, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson at the Market Place venue.

Ms Wilson, who worked as a live music photographer between 1986 and 1992, has taken up a residency in the space run by Emily Smeaton and her father, Rob, with her collection Rock Legends Live.

She first met the gallery owners, who specialise in music-art and deal in limited-edition prints, while they were exhibiting at Henley Festival in 2023.

Ms Wilson mentioned that she had a number of negatives in her attic that had been kept in storage for a number of years.

She said: “We met at the Henley Festival two years ago when I was covering the festival as a journalist.

“I walked past the Ruby Gallery and I saw a picture of Bruce Springsteen being sold and I went in and I saw Rob and I said: ‘I’m interested in the Bruce Springsteen picture, are you selling Springsteen, or the photographer?’

“Rob very humbly said: ‘I’m selling Springsteen. It’s a good picture.”

“And I said, ‘oh, I’ve got pictures like that in my attic’.”

Ms Wilson then worked with the gallery to produce a number of private commissions before returning to the festival to display her work this year.

Her work is split into three parts: Rock Legends, which comprises classic portraits of major artists of the day, Rock Pimp, featuring canvases with exaggerated colours, and Rock Vandal, which is new media.

One of her Rock Vandal pictures features a Prince on his provocative “Lovesexy” tour at London’s Wembley Arena on Monday, July 25, 1988. The 100cm x 100cm giclée print is screen printed with an iridescent glitter gloss and drew a visceral reaction from passers-by at the festival this year.

Ms Wilson said: “I put it right at the front of the gallery and it had people brought to tears as they were looking at it.

“They just stood and cried and said, ‘Thank you for showing me this piece’. And that, for me, therein lies the reward emotionally, for doing it.”

The exhibition features Ms Wilson’s original cameras, which include two Nikon FM2 bodies and various fast lenses as well as light box designs featuring of her work.

She has shot more than
100 artists and much of her work now constitutes “lost media” because it has been stored and unseen for so long. Recalling her time on the road, Ms Wilson said: “I lived in Poole at the time, and the closest gigs would be in London so every shoot needed loads of preparation.

“Film stored at the right temperature and if we were going overseas to Antwerp, New York, Montreux and the like, you would have to have the X-ray-proof bags for all your films and so on.

“Batteries for the winders, a back-up kit, meters, meticulous planning and a lot of driving, a lot of Marlborough Lights, a lot of waiting and a lot of patience, really.”

Ms Wilson recalled that photographers usually had the first three songs to shoot before being “kicked out” of the pit.

She said: “You’ve got between 12 and 15 minutes to shoot that shot and that’s it. We’d be like, ‘Oh, have you got that shot? Have you got that shot?’ If it was Wembley, we’d jump in the car, off to Soho, down to Joe’s basement, get them all developed, sit there sweating a bit more, smoking a bit more. Down there with your chinagraph pen and job done.

“The rest of the work I kept and archived for all of these years.”

After hanging up her camera in 1992, Ms Wilson began a new career in marketing. She joked that when she mentioned her past life as a rock photographer, many of her friends thought she was a geologist.

Ms Wilson said: “The closest you’re actually going get to a fossil is a Rolling Stone.”

l Rock Legends Live is at Hypergallery until Sunday.