Bryan Adams says that he feels like “a photographer moonlighting as a singer” in a new interview.

Adams is not only a famed rock icon, but he’s also had a successful career as a professional photographer. In an interview in the latest issue of Classic Rock magazine, Adams revealed that he now actually sees himself as a photographer first and foremost.

He Didn’t See Himself as a ‘Real Photographer’ For Years

In the interview with Classic Rock magazine that was spotted by Digital Camera World, Adams says he always had a keen interest in photography in his early days as a musician.

Adams would carry a camera everywhere and shoot photographs of life on the road and backstage as a musician. However, he initially never shared his images and kept his photography private — as he believed that he was not a “real” photographer.

In the late 1990s, Adams decided to stop hiding his images. The singer started sharing his work and passion for photography with the world.

“The more I did it, though, the more confidence I got in my own work… so I just started taking things into my own hands,” Adams says.

‘I’m Trying to Find Two or Three Frames That Are Different’

Adams says that he takes a relaxed approach to shooting portraits and finds that problems arise when a lensman tries to force a great photograph out of a subject.

“I like to have a bit of a laugh. I don’t want it to be too stressful and I want people to look great,” Adams explains

“I’m just trying to find those two or three frames that are different from anything else.”

Over the last decade, Adams has photographed figures such as Muhammed Ali, Mick Jagger, Kate Moss, and even Queen Elizabeth II. Adams tells Classic Rock magazine that he now sees himself as “a photographer moonlighting as a singer.”

In 2022, Adams was tapped to photograph the 2022 Pirelli calendar. Titled “On the Road,” Bryans shot the likes of Iggy Pop, Cher, Jennifer Hudson, and Grimes for the calendar.

Image credits: Header photo licensed via Depositphotos.

New Delhi: Photographer Gauri Gill has won the prestigious 10th Annual Prix Pictet Photography and Sustainability Award, securing the massive prize of 100,000 Swiss Francs (approximately $109,219). This award is recognised as one of the world’s most significant, if not the largest, prizes in the realm of photography.

The award was announced on Thursday, September 28.

Gauri Gill.

Gill was selected from the shortlist of 12 photographers for her series Notes from the Desert.

Government hospital, Barmer, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’, 1999-ongoing. Credit: Gauri Gill

Waterwells, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

“On my many visits to rural Rajasthan, I have witnessed a complex reality I knew nothing about as a city dweller. To live poor and landless in the desert amounts to an inescapable reliance on oneself, on each other, and on nature,” said Gill.

Hanuman Nath with his daughter and Hem Nath, on Holi day, Lunkaransar, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

Jannat, Barmer, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill Photo:

The Prix Pictet is described as the world’s leading award for photography and sustainability. Founded in 2008 by the Pictet Group – a Swiss multinational private bank and financial services company – the award’s goal is to harness the power of photography to draw global attention to critical environmental issues.

Entry to this competition is only allowed to individuals nominated through Prix Pictet’s  global network of over 300 nominators which includes critics, curators, and other specialists in the visual arts.

Nominators are asked to recommend portfolios that have the power and artistic quality demanded by the prize.

Since it was founded, the organisation says that more than 5,000 photographers have been nominated, “all of whose work in one way or another testifies to the fragile state of our planet.”

“In a world facing unprecedented challenges, from social inequality to environmental crises, it was crucial to turn the lens towards humanity itself. The theme Human provides a platform to explore the complexities, vulnerabilities, and strengths of the human condition. It allows the artists to capture and communicate the stories, struggles and triumphs of individuals and communities around the globe,” Executive Director of Prix Pictet, Isabelle von Ribbentrop, said.

“Through this theme, Prix Pictet aims to foster a deeper understanding of our shared humanity and inspire meaningful conversations about the issues that impact us all. Especially when thinking about the theme Human, I strongly believe that instead of the future of photography, we should think about photography of the future. The power of the image lies in its ability to foreground critical and urgent environmental issues in a visually impactful yet direct way.”

‘Jogiyon ka dera’, Lunkaransar, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

Mir Hasan with his grandfather Haji Saraj Ud Din, oldest member of the community, in his last days, Barmer, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

Gill’s work emphasises her belief in working with and through community, in what she calls ‘active listening’. For more than two decades, she has been closely engaged with marginalised communities in the desert of western Rajasthan, Northern India and for the last decade with Indigenous artists in Maharashtra.

Her winning series ‘Notes from the Desert’ began in April 1999 when she set out to photograph village schools in Rajasthan. Having grown up mainly in cities, she soon realised that rural schools were a microcosm of a complex reality she knew nothing about.

Visiting the same people and places over decades, she witnessed the whole spectrum of life: drought years and great monsoon; dust storms leading to widespread fevers and floods leading to the rebuilding of homes; epidemics; overwhelmed hospitals and understaffed school; festivals, feuds, celebrations, and prayers.

New homes after the flood, Lunkaransar, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

Surmi, daughter of Ismail the Shepherd, Barmer, from the series ‘Notes from the Desert’. Credit: Gauri Gill

The Dutch photographer Erwin Olaf, who has died aged 64 following a lung transplant, straddled the world of art, advertising and fashion photography with a sumptuous cinematic and painterly aesthetic. Into his meticulously staged works he introduced subtle imperfections to stir disquiet in his audience: “There should be a riddle in every powerful image, so you are intrigued and invited to look over and over again.”

He was influenced by the storytelling power of cinema and the emotion it could provoke. He wanted to create an open-ended narrative in a single shot, to capture the moment between what just happened and what is about to happen. In 2014 he said: “I used to want to conquer the world with strong images, but nowadays I want to say to the viewer: I’ll give you the ingredients, you make the story.”

Olaf began as a controversial figure, striving to subvert established norms, challenge taboos and celebrate diversity. His first inspiration, one that “struck me like lightning” as a student, was Weegee’s Transvestite/The Gay Deceiver c1939, a photograph with a celluloid quality that would stay with him and become a motif of his work. Other influences were the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Helmut Newton and Joel-Peter Witkin, but he also drew inspiration from the Dutch masters Rembrandt, Jan Steen and George Hendrik Breitner.

While living in a squat in Amsterdam in the 1980s, Olaf began photographing the city’s nightlife and the gay liberation movement, exploring sexuality in stark black and white images.

In 1988 he completed a series of images called Chessmen. Comprising 32 sadomasochistic erotic tableaux inspired by medieval chess pieces, Chessmen crystallised the way he wanted to present his work: as a series of thematically linked, single photographs. It was his breakthrough moment and Olaf was awarded first prize in the 1988 Young European Photographer competition. A book of the work was published and his first major solo exhibition opened at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany.

Despite his underground, radical beginnings, his sheer talent, mastery of the medium and innate affinity with the traditions of Dutch art soon meant he was embraced by the mainstream in his homeland. In 2013, he designed the new Dutch euro coins based on his portrait of King Willem-Alexander. He took the official state portraits of the Dutch royal family in 2018, which were turned into the royal Christmas card and issued as postage stamps. The following year, on his 60th birthday, there was a double exhibition of his work in The Hague, and one at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, featuring core work from the 500 items he donated to the museum.

Born Erwin Olaf Springveld in the town of Hilversum to Simon Springveld, a sales manager for an office supplies company, and Alida (nee Van ’t Hoff), he moved with the family to Hoevelaken in 1967 and attended secondary school in Amersfoort. In 1977 he enrolled at the School of Journalism in Utrecht, but in his second year, a photography tutor saw that Erwin was unhappy and invited him to one of his classes: “I felt comfortable with the medium immediately, [it] felt like a homecoming.”

After graduating in 1980, he assisted a photojournalist in Amsterdam for two years, while also documenting the gay scene. He loved the theatre of the clubs, the experimentation with persona and gender identity. He gained his first commission from Vinyl, a music magazine, and was published in queer magazines and newspapers.

But he wanted to create his own reality, his own surrealist dreamworld. He dropped his surname, and his 35mm Nikon camera, and bought a second-hand medium-format Hasselblad, which would bring a more formal quality to his edgy work.

Encouraged to be true to his own instincts by his then partner and muse, the militant gay activist Teun Frieszo, Olaf set up a rudimentary studio. He photographed friends from the queer scene and made money taking portraits but, following his success with Chessmen, finally had the freedom to explore his own artistic vision more fully.

He introduced colour and digital manipulation into his work, which became more expansive, characterised by forensic attention to detail. His team of assistants, wardrobe artists, location scouts and set builders helped him produce flawlessly lit and dressed images that depicted mysterious fairy tales, though behind each beautiful facade lies a fissure, signified by an uneasy pose or an incongruous detail.

He produced work for fashion magazines such as Vogue and Elle, and companies such as Heineken, Microsoft, Bottega Veneta and Diesel Jeans, for which he won the 1999 Silver Lion at the Cannes advertising festival. All the images he created were as worthy of being hung in museums as billboards.

Olaf’s personal work continued to be provocative: Mature (1999) depicts elderly women as sensual supermodels; Fashion Victims (2000) highlights the consumerism of designer labels; and Royal Blood (2000), a series of portraits showing historical figures who came to a sticky end, including a Princess Diana lookalike, explores the public fascination with fame and violence.

This century, he pared back the digital artifice and began to produce work that posed deeper philosophical questions, such as in the series Separation (2003), Hope (2005), Grief (2005) and Keyhole (2011). In Palm Springs (2018), shot in a stylised documentary fashion that juxtaposes models dressed in 1960s clothing within modern landscapes, “reality creeps into the paradise we’ve tried so hard to maintain”. Im Wald (2020) highlights the indifferent power of nature in the face of human arrogance.

From 2008 Olaf was represented in the UK by Hamiltons Gallery in Mayfair. In 2011 he received the Johannes Vermeer award, the Dutch state prize for the arts and, in 2019, was made a knight in the Order of the Netherlands Lion. His 2019 exhibitions coincided with the publication of a monograph, Erwin Olaf: I Am.

Due to hereditary emphysema, he underwent the lung transplant with the hope that it would lengthen his life. On his death, the Dutch royal family issued a statement mourning the nation’s loss of “a unique, exceptionally talented photographer and a great artist”. An artist who, from day one, made photographs inspired by a question posed by his photography tutor, a question he asked of himself and of his audience throughout his life: “What is normal?”

He is survived by his husband, Kevin Ray Edwards, whom he married in Amsterdam in 2016, and his brothers, Jos and Ron.

The Broomfield Photo Club met last week and discussed street photography where club members Carl Muehlemeyer, Tim Seibert, Gerry Case and Phil Castagneri displayed a selection of their photos taken at Denver Stock Show parades. The annual January event marks the opening of the National Western Stock Show that’s led by a small herd of longhorn cattle parading through the streets of downtown Denver. The club meets on the fourth Tuesday of every month, with its next meeting scheduled for Oct. 24. Meetings are also held via Zoom. To learn more about the club, visit  facebook.com/photoclubbroomfield or contact Carl Muehlemeyer at 303-469-0537 or broomfielphotoclub@gmail.com.