The great photographer, who has just died, collaborated with a golden age of musiciansThe
music photographer Mick Rock, who died last week, aged 72, once said that he was “in the business of evoking the aura” of his subjects. It was his great good fortune to be working at a time when the aura emanating from the rock star likes of David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop, all of whom he caught in now celebrated images, was both compelling and unsettling in its androgynous otherness. With Rock’s death, the truly transgressive nature of the cultural moment his photographs captured seems ever more distant.
![Pop is now too controlled to allow a maverick like Mick Rock to flourish | Sean O’Hagan](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/92f2909cdb55902303e55962a0c16ec4c74b3f51/0_11_3600_2160/master/3600.jpg?width=1200&height=630&quality=85&auto=format&fit=crop&overlay-align=bottom%2Cleft&overlay-width=100p&overlay-base64=L2ltZy9zdGF0aWMvb3ZlcmxheXMvdG8tb3BpbmlvbnMucG5n&enable=upscale&s=ea0d9cc7c26f421261cc2f05ad13d44b)
One image of his, in particular, captures the sexual audacity of Bowie’s performances and, almost 50 years on, still carries a trace of its initial illicit charge. Shot from the side of the stage, it shows the
Singer simulating fellatio on Mick Ronson’s guitar during a show at Oxford town hall in 1972. Back then, the act seemed brave to the point of foolhardy in its provocation – it was only five years after homosexuality had been decriminalised in
England and Wales, but that was entirely the point.