This month marks 44 years since Joy Division were photographed on the Epping Walk Bridge in Hulme, resulting in the most iconic images ever taken of the band.
Kevin Cummins was only a few years out of art school at the time of the photoshoot, working for NME. He told Mancunian Matters: “I never thought when we took the pictures that I’d be talking about them four months later, never mind 44 years on.”
Cummins is an avid Man City supporter, and says that the shoot may never have happened if the team had been playing at home. The bad weather meant that there wasn’t a game at the weekend (the only time the band were able to shoot because they all had jobs), leaving the photographer’s Saturday available.
“I spoke to my editor on the Friday and said that I was really worried about the snow because I thought it would date the pictures, because I was thinking journalistically…I wouldn’t want pictures that looked like we’d taken them at another time, you always want to make them feel current.
“I didn’t think the shot on the bridge would ever be used because it wasn’t a rock and roll image as such. It was an architectural picture of Manchester with four people getting in the way.”
Despite his concerns about the images, Cummins’ photographs would become a crucial part of Joy Division’s iconography, and turn Epping Walk Bridge into a tourist attraction. The replies to his tweets are flooded with images of people recreating the photograph, decades on.
Cummins said: “I like the idea of telling a story with a picture, rather than just having someone gurning in the foreground, throwing a can of beer at the camera or something.
“When you’ve worked for a music paper for a long time, you get good access to people so you’re able to build the iconography of that band. I think that’s really important and I think that’s what bands don’t seem to appreciate these days”.
He says that bands now see artists like himself as people who just want to make money from them, without understanding that it’s a two-way street: “A lot of them do their own photographs and put too much information out about themselves whereas, certainly when I was a kid, I didn’t want to know everything about a band, I wanted an air of mystery around them. They don’t get it…
“If you haven’t got great pictures of your band, then no one’s gonna care in 20 years time.”
Cummins has lived in London for 35 years now, but returns to Manchester every week to watch Man City play.
Featured image: Terekhova on Flickr
