Shooting for the Stars, Smiling for the Camera
THE WORK OF MOTOWN PHOTOGRAPHERS (AT THE RIGHT PRICE)
By way of a photographer’s darkroom came the music and magic which entranced the world.
That’s what the Hitsville studio was before Berry Gordy’s magicians moved in. “There was a huge cinder block room that had been added on as a darkroom,” recalled his second wife, Raynoma, in her autobiography, about finding and viewing the property at 2648 West Grand. “I couldn’t have dreamed up a more perfect place for a recording studio.”
How better, then, to begin this snapshot of those who captured Motown’s people and places on film? Well, some of the photographers, at least. The total number must run into the hundreds, but the most familiar names – those who took the pictures we all recognise immediately, instinctively – are relatively few. They include James Kriegsmann, J. Edward Bailey, Frank Dandridge, Jim Hendin, Jim Britt. And you may know of more, such as William “Popsie” Randolph and Pierre Bass, Leo Knight and Larry Schiller.
The Supremes, photographed by Bruce Davidson
Still others are unfamiliar or unknown. The innocent image on the front of Motown Records’ first LP release, Hi! We’re The Miracles, is credited only to Pictorial Studios Inc., a Detroit outfit. To this day, Smokey and Claudette probably remember the burgundy-trimmed shirts and cummerbunds they wore for the shoot, but perhaps not the name of the photographer. In his Hype & Soul! memoir, Motown publicist Al Abrams noted that Detroit radio DJ Chuck Daugherty “shot many of our early artist publicity photos.” Later in the 1960s, one of the company’s ace promotion men frequently wielded a camera: “Weldon McDougal,” said Barney Ales, “was one hell of a photographer.”
Gordy was a camera enthusiast, too. In 1965, he took with his Leicaflex “a thousand pictures” of Diana Ross during their April in Paris. On the same trip, he’s caught on film himself, snapping the Supremes by a bus at Le Bourget airport. Two years before, while visiting Germany, Gordy had run the risk of trouble by taking video footage – forbidden by the authorities – in communist East Berlin. “I was kind of crazy in those times,” he told me, “but I really wanted documentary stuff.”
The Four Tops, photographed by Leo Knight
As Motown started putting hits on the board, it began using credentialed showbiz photographers, particularly New York-based Kriegsmann and Randolph. The former took classic portrait shots of many of the firm’s artists, his distinctive brand name on the bottom of each print. A favourite pictorial device? Faux Roman plinths on which the stars could lean, or pose by. With or without those, there are memorable Kriegsmann photos of the Supremes, the Temptations, the Four Tops, the Marvelettes, Marvin Gaye and Tammi Terrell (together and solo), Harvey Fuqua, Jimmy Ruffin, Stevie Wonder, the Originals, the Monitors, Edwin Starr, Gladys Knight & the Pips, and more. He was the Supremes’ “number one photographer,” Mary Wilson declared last year, “and he created some of our most iconic images.”
Randolph’s work for Motown doesn’t seem as ubiquitous or stylized, but there are distinctive Popsie publicity pix of Gaye (in bow tie and flowered jacket) and Jr. Walker & the All Stars (in luminous jackets), while an in-concert shot captured Little Stevie in full harmonica flow, encouraged by enthusiastic DJ Murray The K.
For all its use of photographic professionals, Motown rarely put their names on album artwork during the 1960s, even though it often credited the cover designers. This was the jurisdiction of Esther Gordy Edwards, to whom art director Bernie Yeszin reported when he started freelancing for the firm in 1962. Also recruited to that team, several years later, was Harry Webber, who recalled (in liner notes for The Complete Motown Singles’ 11th volume) that Ed Bailey was another photographer of choice, although Mrs. Edwards considered him expensive. That was no surprise, considering that this Detroit native also freelanced for some of America’s top magazines: Time, Life, Fortune. But for the Motown dollar, Bailey would do as required – such as shoots for less-than-stars, the Dalton Boys, and modest hitmakers, the Elgins.
Diana, Marvin & company, photographed by Jim Britt
Another Life photographer, Frank Dandridge, was Webber’s preference. “An up-and-coming photojournalist out of New York, Frank was very handsome, very dashing, and had a great personality,” he explained in the TCMS notes. “His devil-may-care attitude meshed well with the artists and therefore with Mrs. Edwards. But mainly his price was right, and Mrs. Edwards had always been about the money first, so she thought that Frank was the greatest thing since sliced bread.”
Dandridge certainly was experienced, having documented political events such as Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream” address in Washington, D.C. in 1963, and the Harlem riot the following year. He impressed Motown when covering the Supremes for a ’66 Look magazine feature, then got seriously busy for the company with album cover shoots for The Supremes A’Go-Go, Wonder’s Down To Earth and Someday At Christmas, the Temptations’ Gettin’ Ready, the Four Tops’ On Broadway, Smokey Robinson & the Miracles’ Away We A Go-Go, Martha & the Vandellas’ Watchout! and The Marvelettes.
Jim Hendin opened his studio in Detroit in 1967, with Motown in his sights. After months of persistence, he secured a shoot with Reeves & the Vandellas for their album, Sugar n’ Spice. “Although there would be many more album covers to follow,” he recalled years later, “the thrill and excitement of this first session was unparalleled.” He also realised that although Motown was by then headquartered in downtown Detroit, it “kept the original sense that we were not simply a big company, but instead a big extended family.” There was, he added, an “all for one, one for all cohesiveness that made working for Motown a spectacular experience.”
Marvin Gaye, photographed by Jim Hendin
Hendin assuredly put in time and effort, shooting all the company’s artists, major and minor, as an independent contractor from 1968-74. In his blog, he remembered photo sessions in his northwest Detroit studio “where an always happy Stevie Wonder could be seen with his tape recorder and harmonica, or where the Supremes and the Four Tops would get together as the supergroup ‘Magnificent Seven’ for an outrageous session complete with cowboy chaps, hats, holsters and saddles.”
Still, Hendin’s most famous images were those undertaken not in the studio, but at Marvin Gaye’s Detroit home in the spring of ’71 – for What’s Going On. “It took some coaxing to get him to even do a photo shoot,” Hendin reminisced in Ben Edmonds’ 2001 book about the music masterpiece. “With the album not done, it was the last thing he wanted to think about. But when I got to the house, he couldn’t have been more cooperative.”
The mission required a couple of days’ labour, inside and outside. “The cover shots were the last ones taken,” said Hendin. “Marvin went out into his backyard, and as I clicked away it began to snow. That drizzle added everything to the shots. Luck, or something stronger, was with us that day.” (His good fortune was on display this summer at the Motown Museum with a new exhibit, Capturing A Culture Change: Motown Through The Lens of Jim Hendin.)
For his part, San Francisco-born Jim Britt understood about music as well as photography. He was a singer first, with a group, the Cables, then solo. “He uses no gimmicks nor physical antics, just sings straight-out with good meter and a pretty fair voice to match,” wrote a Variety reviewer of Britt’s Los Angeles debut in July 1968 at Dino’s Lodge. But this career was not to be, and his longtime interest in photography came to the fore; he was also fortunate that Motown had moved to California in 1972, yielding him a job as assistant art director and photographer.
The Marvelettes, photographed by Pierre Bass
As his predecessors had done, Britt captured on film almost every Motown act of the day, often with imagination not considered appropriate or manageable in previous times: a David Ruffin photoshoot with lions, for example. Naturally, Marvin Gaye figured prominently in Britt’s recollections, including sessions which produced iconic images (the star in disco boots) and experiences: “Diana was pregnant and couldn’t take Marvin smoking,” he remembered on his website of their 1973 duet album. “They recorded separately after that.” Evidence exists in a particular Britt frame, taken in the recording studio with Nick Ashford and Valerie Simpson, where Gaye appears to be lighting up, while Ross seems irritated, sitting next to a stressed Shelly Berger. “Turns out I’m a year older than Marvin,” Britt revealed on Instagram earlier this year, “and photographing him and designing the covers changed my life.”
Others will likely make similar statements, even if their stints snapping the hits and misses of Motown were brief. Staying in the 1960s and ’70s, here are a few more tales of those who chronicled “the Sound of Young America” on camera:
Curtis Woodson was tasked by Berry Gordy with documenting 1962’s multi-artist package tour as it travelled up and down America’s Eastern seaboard. “Marv Johnson was like a ‘ghost’ during the first few weeks of the tour,” he wrote in Memories of the 1962 Motown Revue – A Photographic Journal. “I never saw him at rehearsals, during lunch or dinner breaks, or at our hotel, and since he travelled in his private car, I never saw him on the road.” Published in 2005, Woodson’s book contains many striking images and first-hand commentary. It’s also extremely rare: Motown collector Bill Staiger told me of his protracted attempts to reach the photographer, and of his eventual contact. “He went into the background [of the assignment] and told me that he had high hopes of making a million dollar profit out of the book sales. He finally sold me a copy and autographed it.”
The Elgins, photographed by Ed Bailey
The work of Pierre Bass graced the sleeves of some of Motown’s most important 1968 albums, including the Marvelettes’ Sophisticated Soul, Marvin Gaye’s In The Groove and Diana Ross & the Supremes Sing and Perform “Funny Girl.” (With its recent 2CD reissue, the last of these included outtakes from the photo shoot.) Bass also photographed a sharp-suited Barney Ales at work and the Four Tops on the golf course, but finding anything more about his career has proved difficult. Even on those ’68 LP sleeves, only his last name appears – as if an afterthought – next to the notation, “GA-P.”
Leo Knight is less of a mystery, having been a respected Detroit-area wedding/event photographer for more than 40 years. His assignments for Motown included memorable images of the Four Tops, used for album artwork and for the 45 picture sleeve of “Reach Out I’ll Be There.” West Grand Blog reader David Yellen, who was employed by Knight in the ’90s, revealed that all those images came from a one-day shoot at Wayne State University in Detroit. “He gave me a proof sheet, and about a dozen outtakes. They started the photoshoot at Hitsville, then took the Lodge Freeway to WSU, stopping to take a couple of shots on an overpass. There is also a 16mm film they shot while driving, where the Tops are passing a telephone receiver around the car. It was a prop from Leo’s studio, and they thought it was really funny, in the days way before cellphones!” Those familiar with WSU may recognise where some of the Tops’ photos were taken, at the McGregor Memorial Conference Center.
Beyond these are hundreds of other photographers, worldwide, with Motown stars in their portfolios, alive in their memories, vivid in their minds’ eyes. Some are worth mentioning here just for individual shots: Lawrence Schiller for the Jackson 5, oceanside in California, with superstardom on the horizon; Bud Johnson for Stevie Wonder in Studio A with the Funk Brothers, including James Jamerson on stand-up bass; Bruce Davidson for the Supremes, prepping for showtime in New York; Doug Jeffery for Diana Ross and Berry Gordy, the latter scooping up the former into his arms at a London concert venue.
By way of a photographer’s darkroom came the music and magic which entranced the world.
Book notes: reflecting Motown’s visual style has been the goal of various coffee-table volumes over the years, including The Motown Album (St. Martin’s Press, 1990) by an assembly of writers, and the French-language Motown Soul & Glamour by Florent Mazzoleni and Gilles Pétard (Le Serpent à Plumes, 2009). Then there’s (ahem) Motown: The Sound of Young America by yours truly with Barney Ales (Thames & Hudson, 2016), as well as two other T&H titles, Legacy by the Jacksons with Fred Bronson (2017) and Supreme Glamour by Mary Wilson with Mark Bego (2019). The work of Jim Britt appears in his own Photos and Stories Volume 1: From Nightclubs to Motown, published last year. Photos taken by the above-mentioned Weldon McDougal appear in Motown: The Golden Years by Bill Dahl (Krause, 2001), while Motown: The History by Sharon Davis (Guinness, 1988) similarly spans Hitsville’s chronology. Veteran snapper Bruce A. Talamon outweighs the competition – literally – with his voluminous Soul R&B Funk (Taschen, 2018), which features many images of Motown royalty as well as other stars.