Adam Cooper

Curating his late father’s fêted photographic archive has been a life’s work, Adam tells Niall Hampton

Film camera technician Adam Cooper has enjoyed a successful career in the movie industry, having worked on 42 feature films, plus numerous documentaries, adverts and music videos. In his spare time and downtime from the movies, his other job is custodian and curator of the Michael Cooper archive, a collection of images produced between the early 1960s and 1973, until the photographer’s death at the age of 34.

Thanks to his close relationship with The Rolling Stones and The Beatles, Michael Cooper is often referred to as “a rock’n’roll photographer”, but the breadth of his work challenges this label. More accurately, he was a figure on the contemporary art scene in Sixties London, fast establishing itself in response to the Pop Art movement in the US.

One of the London scene’s high watermarks was the collaboration that produced the album cover for The Beatles’ SgtPepper’sLonely

HeartsClubBand (1967) – this was conceived by artists Peter Blake and Jann Haworth, and photographed by Michael Cooper in his Chelsea studio. Cooper then went on to shoot the album cover for The Rolling Stones’

TheirSatanicMajestiesRequest in 1968. Alongside these two major commissions stands Cooper’s uncommissioned output of reportage photography – intimate portraits of leading artists, musicians, writers and cultural figures, plus eyewitness images from 1968’s anti-war demonstrations at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago and the US embassy in London’s Grosvenor Square. You must be delighted that three decades after publication, Blinds & Shutters is still something that people are interested in. Yes. Genesis Publications recently got in touch to say it was the 30th anniversary of the book and the 40th anniversary of Genesis, and would I be prepared to release the remaining copies [severalhundredhadbeenheldback].

I agreed, and it has done really well. We’re creating a small exhibition around it, in four or five different countries. It’s amazing that 30 years later, there’s still such great interest in the book. And it’s all based on Michael’s ideas.

I received his archive in a tatty old cardboard box, with no protection for the negatives. There was a lot of paperwork, and I came across a note he’d written explaining the concept of Blinds&Shutters and how he wanted to be. Most photography books around the time it was published were what are seen as coffee-table books, with full-page, half-page and quarter-page images – conservative and boring. What Michael wanted for Blinds&

Shutters was to have people talking about what they were doing in the photographs and their relationship with him.

I followed his ideas to the letter, and knocked on the doors of the major commercial publishers in London; they all showed great interest but typically just wanted to do a book on The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. That’s not what the concept is all about – we’re diving into the whole collection and bringing out images from all the things that Michael covered. In the same way that actors get typecast, he got tarred in the same