The Rest Is History - Music: The Father of the Blues, Golden Age of Jazz, and David Bowie | History in Photos

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

**Unlock the full episode and the complete History in Photos mini series by joining The Rest Is History Club at therestishistory.com** Why are there only three confirmed photographs of Blues-legend Robert Johnson? How did Art Kane’s photo of 1950’s NYC Jazz musicians Great Day In Harlem serve as a symbol of American segregation? And, what is the connection between David Bowie’s face paint on the Aladdin Sane album cover, Elvis Presley, and the Templar Christian Brotherhood? In today’s episode of our new member’s-only mini-series, Dominic is joined by photographer Chris Floyd to discuss iconic photographs of the most famous and influential 20th century musicians.  Getty Images has one of the largest and oldest privately held archives globally with access to over 150 million images dating back to the beginning of photography. From historical images created in the early 1800s to more contemporary 1990s imagery, the Getty Images archive houses a wealth of socially significant, historical photos, videos and prints, and includes content from over 40 editorial content partners including Gamma-Rapho, Paris Match, The Bettmann Archive, Sygma and Motorsport Images. Our archive video collection contains 3.1 million hours of offline video footage and includes partners such as NBC News Archives, ITN, Sky News and the BBC Motion Gallery. _______ Twitter: @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Video Editors: Jack Meek, Harry Swan + Adam Thornton Social Producer: Harry Balden Producers: Tabby Syrett & Aaliyah Akude Senior Producer: Callum Hill Executive Producer: Dom Johnson Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hi everybody, it's Dominic here from The Rest is History. So we are in the middle of an exclusive mini-series for our Rest Is History Club members about photography and the way it has been interwoven with the story of history. And in today's episode with the great photographer Chris Floyd, we are looking in particular at music. So we'll be talking about the great bluesman, Robert Johnson, who sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in Mississippi. We'll be looking at the great titans of jazz assembly, in Harlem in the 1950s for a group portrait. We were talking about the career of David Bowie, and we are talking about an iconic image of Grace Jones from the 1980s. Now, if you don't want

to miss out on this, all you need to do is to go to therestishistory.com to sign up. And not only will you get this exclusive miniseries, but you'll get a host of truly unbelievable benefits. So we hope to see you at the restishistory.com. And in the meantime, here's a little clip. of the episode. So our third image that Chris has chosen and Chris this is somebody that you photographed

yourself but you didn't choose your own picture of him and that's David Bowie just before we talk about the picture photographing David Bowie was it fun?

Stressful because again you're with someone who's worked with the very best and also not only with the very best but also done it a lot and has

probably limited patients for any faffing around but it was good he was surgically funny about other famous people. Oh, that's always good. And their foibles. Right.

Yeah. Right. Was anybody he particularly disliked? Well, I wouldn't say disliked, but he made a very pointed and amusing comment about Brian Ferry. Well, okay, I know the 70s glam rock kind of product. So, this is a picture. It was an album cover. It's Aladdin Sane.

It's Aladinsane, yeah. And it's taken by a great 60s. photographer, actually. Brian Duffy, one of the kind of, one of the infante terrible of kind of 60s photography. Yes, there was Duffy, Terrence Donovan and David Bailey, and they were, they were given, they were known as the Black Trinity. Right. All from the East End, all, you know, classic 60s working class boys who did good. You know, high-end photographers had been involved with album covers since the Beatles, I guess. It's about the mid-60s, 64, 65. And, and, and, you know, And Brian Duffy being invited to come in and do David Bowie.

I mean, it's a sign of how successful David Bowie is at this point. Because what year are we in? We're in 73. So Bowie's at his peak? No, he's not at his peak, actually. So there's a great story about this. So Bowie's manager, it was called Tony DeFries, operated on the theory that if he made the record company spend a lot of money,

then they would be committed because they would have spent so much money on a project that they would have to put the effort in to make their money back. This album cover in particular, he said to, he went to Duffy and said, we've got to make this album cover as expensive as we possibly can. And Duffy said, well, no problem. Yeah, he's delighted by that. So he, you know, he hired one of the best makeup artists in the world. The printing of the image was done using a Kodak process called Dyer Transfer printing,

which was the most expensive process by which you could print an image in those days. So I was going to ask about this, because there's a technical story behind this picture. So for people who can't see it, I mean, you should, have a look at it. You can Google it or you can watch the episode on the website or whatever. So the image is a kind of white and pale David Bowie shot from kind of shoulders upwards. He's got this kind of shock of red hair and he's got this zigzag pattern on his face, the kind of red and blue zigzag. And the technical skill that was brought to this.

So Duffy had just done the Pirelli calendar, is that right? He's using the same techniques that he'd used on the Porelli calendar. Yeah. So it's dye transfer. So you make a plate, a printing plate for each color in the, so red, green and blue. You make a separate plate for each color. It's extremely expensive. And it was done in Switzerland, which made it triply expensive.

Right. Having to go to Switzerland. Yeah. So there's a documentary about him actually called The Man Who Shot the 60s. He quoted Tony DeVries wanted to make the most expensive cover he could possibly get a record company to pay for. If it costs 50 quid, then they could say, so what? But if it costs 5,000 pounds, the record company were now having to pay attention. the record company couldn't have come to a better con artist than my good self.

Okay, good line. So he does this extremely expensive process. It's all part of Bowie's, I mean, Bowie's famous, isn't he, for pioneering the idea that a rock star or a pop star has a kind of, has a malleable image that is constantly changing between each incarnation. He will assume different personalities. So Zigi Stardust or Aladdin'sane or the thin white, or whatever.

And this is all part of the image making that goes hand in hand. It's actually very different from the Robert Johnson pictures. He is unconscious of his image. He's not even thinking about his image because he's not conscious of himself as a musical celebrity, of course.

He's just a jobbing musician. Well, Johnson's in a pre-image era, isn't he? He's a pre-mass media era, really. People are not selling music based on an image in the way that they were by the time we get to Bowie here.

So even the jazz musicians in A Great Day of Harlem, there was an innocence, I suppose, that image. I mean, they're all quite, they're all very smartly dressed, aren't they? They're sharply dressed, but there's no sense, I would say, of it being a contrivance. Whereas the Bowie image is pure contrivance. Yeah, they've all thought about what they're wearing. Yeah.

And they've all put effort and consideration to it because it was important to them to look good. But they've all done it in their own individual personal way. With Bowie, you have elevation of the individual to superstar status rather than simple, old-fashioned star status. He's sort of going, it's superstars, you know, the idea that he's from another planet and he's an alien and all of that stuff. You know, there's a great, interesting background to the lightning flash on his face. Yeah.

So he got that from Elvis. You know, the Memphis Mafia, Elvis's buddies, you know, that he's sort of posse. Yeah. So they were the Memphis Mafia and he had this logo design for them, which was a lightning flash and the letter's TCB, which stuff were taking care of business. Right. But Elvis actually stole that from the Templar Christian Brotherhood. TCB. He took the TCV of the of the Templar Christian Brotherhood,

changed it to taking care of business, stole their lightning flash, and made it his own thing, and then Bowie stole the lightning flash from Elvis. Wow. So there's this lineage of it. It all comes from the Templar Christian Brotherhood. Wow. I suppose Bowie, you could argue, his fascination with image leads him down some dark paths, doesn't it in the 70s, the point at which he's giving interviews saying, oh, Hitler was a rock star and all this kind of thing. Well, later on in his career, he said, Oh yeah, I was carrying too far the idea of playing a part, I suppose. Yeah.

And as a photographer yourself, so here when you're, I mean, obviously this is all contrivance, this picture. Yeah. And when you're taking your portraits of people, when someone says to you, will you go and photograph, I don't know, Paul McCarney or Bill Gates or however, how much are you as a photographer colluding in the creation of a confected image or how much are you trying to instead get to the truth? I mean, that's just two totally different things. Here they're creating, it's an album cover. That's what they're doing. They're creating an image, a two-dimensional image for an album cover. The things you're talking about with the things, those things, I'm doing a portrait for an interview in a magazine or something like that.

And really you're trying to capture some element of them that is compelling on the page. Not necessarily any truth, but just an image that makes people stop and read the headline. Thank you so much for listening to that. So if you want to hear the rest of that episode, which is of course all about music, then just head to the rest is history.com to join the club and to get all the other benefits. So please do join us at the rest is history club. We would love to have you with us. And on that bombshell, bye-bye.