Barry Feinstein RIP

Feinstein by Dylan

Barry Feinstein obituary
Photographer behind striking album covers for Bob Dylan, George Harrison and Janis Joplin

Sean O'Hagan
guardian.co.uk
Monday 24 October 2011

The American photographer Barry Feinstein, who has died aged 80, made his most famous series of images when he accompanied Bob Dylan and the Band on their controversial tour of Britain in 1966. On stage, Dylan was aloof to the point of imperious, a dandy in shades and a sharp suit, willing his new electric music on disgruntled audiences who wanted the familiar folk singer they knew and revered.

When Feinstein's fly-on-the-wall photographs of the tour finally appeared in his book Real Moments, published in 2008, Dylan emerged as an even more complex figure. Often he looks gaunt and fragile, his eyes hidden behind ever-present shades, his body hunched against the cold British winds and the imploring eyes of his faithful. One such image of Dylan waiting for the Aust ferry to take him across the Severn was used as the poster for No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese's epic 2005 documentary on Dylan.

Feinstein also captured Dylan away from the spotlight, in more relaxed mood: posing with a bunch of ragged children in Liverpool or talking to three bohemian Dublin girls, who look almost as hip as he does. "They were poets," the deadpan Feinstein wrote in his notes, "and he was quite taken with their poems."

Born in Philadelphia, Feinstein had no formal training in photography, but took to it instinctively after some casual snapshots he took while working at a racetrack in Atlantic City in 1955 revealed a gift for atmosphere and detail. That year, he was hired as a photographic assistant for Life magazine, and one of his first jobs was covering the Miss America pageant. Soon after, he headed west and landed a production assistant job at Columbia Pictures in Hollywood, taking photographs whenever and wherever he could. "I didn't want to photograph the glamour end of it," he said. "It was the 'behind the scene' thing that interested me – the part of Hollywood that nobody thinks about or looks at."

His breakthrough came after he befriended Steve McQueen and was commissioned to photograph him for Look magazine. The results were relaxed but revealing. Although he made formal portraits when he had to, his instinct was for the dramatic moment or the telling detail. He memorably accompanied Marlon Brando to a civil rights rally and captured the actor being jeered at by racist counter-demonstrators. When he was given access to Marilyn Monroe's room a few hours after her suicide, he photographed the bottle of pills by her bedside.

In 1958, Feinstein met Albert Grossman in a nightclub in Los Angeles and was immediately hired to photograph the fledgling manager's new act: a folk group called Peter, Paul and Mary. Soon after the shoot, Feinstein married the singer Mary Travers. It was Travers who took him to see the young Dylan at a coffee shop in New York's East Village. "I had to figure it out," Feinstein later said of his first encounter with Dylan's music. When Dylan looked at Feinstein's black and white pictures, he was immediately impressed, commenting on their "angles" and "stark atmosphere" which, he said, reminded him of the work of Robert Frank.

A 10-minute photoshoot with Dylan produced the intense portrait that became the cover of the singer's third album, The Times They Are a-Changin'. Shot from below, it is all angles and stark atmosphere. It was the first of several iconic record cover portraits by Feinstein. They include Pearl by Janis Joplin (the photo session happened the night before she died of a drug overdose), and All Things Must Pass by George Harrison, in which the ex-Beatle sits in his garden at Friar Park, Henley-on-Thames, surrounded by ornamental gnomes.

Occasionally, Feinstein courted controversy with his cover images. For Ike and Tina Turner's 1968 album, Outta Season, he provocatively posed the duo in whiteface, eating watermelons. His proposed image for the Rolling Stones' album Beggars Banquet – a shot of a public toilet covered in graffiti – was rejected by the group's record company, despite Keith Richard's testimony that it was "a real funky cover". Feinstein worked as a cameraman on the music festival documentary Monterey Pop (1968) and directed the cult hippy film You Are What You Eat (1968). In 1970, he and Tom Wilkes formed a graphic design company called Camouflage. Together, they created memorable album covers including GP by Gram Parsons, The Gilded Palace of Sin by the Flying Burrito Bros and Eric Clapton's eponymously titled debut solo album. Feinstein was reunited with Dylan and the Band when he was hired as the official photographer for their 1974 world tour. His shot of a vast sea of people holding aloft Zippos and lit scraps of paper graced the cover of the ensuing live album, Before the Flood.

Feinstein continued working as a photographer, doing travel shoots as well as rock portraits, into the early 1990s. In 1993, he was seriously injured in a road accident near his home in Woodstock; during his long convalescence, he began editing his archive. In 2008, a book of his early film star portraits was published, entitled Hollywood Foto-Rhetoric: The Lost Manuscript. It included a sequence of prose poems written by Dylan in the 1960s that were inspired by the photographs. They had languished in Feinstein's attic for more than 40 years. Feinstein had no creative control over the book's production, and was reputed to be less than pleased with the results.

The photographs of Dylan from 1966, collected in Real Moments, were exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in London in 2009. "I wanted my pictures to say something," Feinstein wrote. "I don't really like stand-up portraits; there's nothing there, no life, no feeling. I was much more interested in capturing real moments."

Feinstein is survived by his third wife, Judith; by his daughter, Alicia (from his marriage to Travers); by his son, Alex (from his marriage to the actor Carol Wayne); and by three stepchildren and three grandchildren.

• Barry Feinstein, photographer, born 4 February 1931; died 20 October 2011

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