Brian Griffin (1948-2024)
Dear Dave n.36, 2024
The British photographer Brian Griffin died on January 29. It is fair to say he wasn’t a household name, but the outpouring of feeling has been intense, particularly among fellow photographers. They knew how good he was, and how unique he was.
Griffin theatricalized and dramatized things you wouldn’t expect to receive that kind of treatment. Boring men in suits. Offices. Sliced bread. Familiar streets. He could make you feel, usually with a sense of comic surrealism, the gap between his mundane subjects and their wild transformation into unlikely but compelling images. Life is boring and must be elevated, if only to laugh at how boring it really is. Maybe that’s a kind of working-class humour. Maybe it’s to do with coming from Birmingham, one of the most tragically boring cities in the UK, and hence one of the most creative.
Talks by artists can be terribly boring, making us regret ever wanting to know more than the art might give us. But very occasionally, an artist makes a presentation that is unforgettable. In 1988, as an undergraduate student I went to London’s National Portrait Gallery to see Brian Griffin present his new photographs. I knew a little of his work, including his striking cover for Joe Jackson’s album Look Sharp, and some strange and stylish portraits in dog-eared issues of Management Today. Griffin had been photographing Broadgate, a postmodern Gotham-style development in London’s booming financial district. A spotlight hit a lush red curtain, and into it he stepped, wearing a showman-vampire cape, which he removed and cast aside in one suave gesture. To the right, a second spotlight picked out three musicians (Elvis Costello’s super-tight band, The Attractions). A pulsing rhythm and big, stabbing chords accompanied even bigger images – square, black & white, and vivid. A Hasselblad medium-format projector clunked beside me in the audience, throwing a dazzling sequence of photographs at the stage. And Griffin, swaying gently, began to sing his presentation. Yes. Sing. “The Big Tie Came Down on Broadgate!” The photographs he showed that night had been a commission, but they were clearly brimming with Griffin’s own visual panache and puckish wit. Through his eye, a Thatcherite amalgam of office blocks looked for all the world like a combination of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis and the setting for some absurd but dark ritual. Given how the shamelessly greedy the finance industries were, this seemed about right.
Griffin was a true original, a photographer who had somehow invented himself as an act of pure artistic will and survival. In the early 1970s he had studied with Martin Parr and Daniel Meadows, but none of their parochially limp realism seemed to rub off on him. Looking back (with a better sense of photo history than I had as a student), I now see that his frame of reference was the European modernism of the 1920s and 30s: the New Vision, Surrealism, expressionist cinema, and the vivid industrial photography that could make you worship an office desk or rack of test tubes. Back then, many of the most significant photographers had no regard for boundaries between art and commerce. Some were pivotal figures in the avant gardes while also being well-paid image makers. Photography was understood as the promiscuous scrambler of distinctions and hierarchies. But the British art and photography scenes have never really grasped this, and Brian Griffin never received the full recognition he deserved. He was, by far, the most creative and singular photographer to have emerged from the bleak and backward visual landscape of ’70s Britain.
Key to Griffin’s early development was the always surprising work he was able to make for Management Today, a magazine not exactly regarded for its visual flair. He developed a canny knack for turning corporate board members, union leaders, scientists, factory workers and their products into disarming and sometimes extravagant tableaux. His camera craft was impeccable, and it seemed there was nothing he couldn’t do. It led to shooting now-famous record covers for the likes of Kate Bush, Depeche Mode and Siouxsie and the Banshees. He moved into film, making commercials and music videos, but always came back to still photography, publishing over twenty books. My students adore his work.
Griffin’s photographs were up in the clouds of imagination, but in interviews and in-person he was down to earth, and quite devoid of pretension. Create your work, create yourself the best you possibly can, but stay grounded. The wilful creativity and restless invention came from knowing the alternative could well be life in a factory. He was tireless and hungry, driven almost maniacally at times to make the very best images he could. The result is a body of work that will last. Of course, it helps that the photographs, like the man who made them, were always slightly out of time to begin with. Perhaps that’s how it is with true originality.