From the archive
31 March 2001
EDITORS love a pun and 20 years ago this week AP’s cover featured some fairly risqué ones. As Features Editor I presented a ten-pageHendrix portrait, he also shot many other classic images, including Kate Bush’s cover and portraits of everyone from Harry Secombe to Oasis. Today, looking barely a day older, he’s on the selection panel for AP’s series. This 2001 issue also saw the continuation of our series recreating images from the book , by the late Roger Hicks. Too cheap to hire a model, we press-ganged our sub-editor Breandan Maguire to stand in for Cary Grant – he had successfully stood in for Humphrey Bogart in a previous instalment. ‘Breandan already owned a sweater similar to the one worn by Grant in the original photo and brought his own hair dressing too,’ I explained. This was a five-light set-up using Interfit tungsten lamps, which got so hot that a sheet of card used as a flag started smoking and had to be replaced before it caught fire. Elsewhere the big news story was a report on privacy law, following Henri Cartier-Bresson’s ironic attempt to prevent the publication of a book showing private pictures of himself relaxing at a Parisian café, taken without his permission. As a result the book was withdrawn from the French market, where privacy laws are strong, but not in the US, where they are less so, or the UK where there are no relevant privacy laws at all.
