The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Review
‘I learnt how to make colours freak out’
In the Swinging Sixties, Karl Ferris’s ‘psychedelic photography’ defined how we saw everyone from Jimi Hendrix to the Beatles
Karl Ferris is the inventor of “psychedelic photography”. Decades before Photoshop, Ferris, a photographer from Hastings, created elaborate, swirling, multicoloured tableaux using montage, filtration, saturation, fisheye lenses and infrared film. At the height of the Swinging Sixties, he hung out with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, conjured up light shows for Pink Floyd, painted costumes for Eric Clapton, and produced ground-breaking album covers and mind-frazzling posters for Jimi Hendrix, Cream, Donovan and the Hollies.
“I was never just a photographer,” he says, beaming in via Zoom from his home in Ibiza. “I wanted to make pictures. I had a vision in mind, I got the clothes, location, set direction, and I would put it all together, so it was a more painterly approach.” Ferris had been working in black and white – “the high contrast, David Bailey, mod thing” – when he crossed paths with a Dutch design duo known as the Fool during a fashion shoot in Ibiza in 1966, where a proto-hippie community was developing, “full of joy and laughter”. There may also have been drugs involved, he concedes. “I suddenly became aware of a whole world of colour, and I thought, wow, how do I capture this?”
Ferris arranged for the Fool to join him back in London, where they shared a studio in Notting Hill that became a hub of the emerging psychedelic scene, peopled with pop stars and supermodels. They ran “happenings” with live music and light shows, while Ferris was experimenting with “liquid light projection” and colour film. “It was quite technical, and when I first started, I got lousy pictures. But I could make colours freak out and reverse and glow. It was something completely new.”
Among the most famous examples of his work are covers for Jimi Hendrix’s 1967 debut album Are You Experienced (the gaudily flamboyant US edition) and the following year’s Electric Ladyland (a burnedout performance headshot). “Jimi was sweet and soft-spoken. We’d talk about philosophy, art and music for hours. He was kind of shy, except when he was playing, then he was totally mesmerising. He said the music used to play him.”
One of Ferris’s oddest claims to fame is changing Hendrix’s hairstyle after he saw the star emerging from the shower. “Usually he wore it like the English guys, straightened out and lacquered down,” recalls Ferris, who encouraged Hendrix to go au naturel. “He said, ‘It looks crazy!’ I said, ‘No, man, it looks unique and spacey, it’s just what we need for the cover.’ His girlfriend trimmed it into a ball at my suggestion, and so we had the very first ‘Afro’.”
A wizened character of slightly ambiguous age – the birthdate he gives, 1948, sits awkwardly with some of the milestones in his life – Ferris has led a charmed existence, dropping in and out of pop history at significant moments like a hippie Zelig. He saw the Beatles in the Cavern – “They were terrific, it was obvious beat music was going to be the new thing” – taught Pink Floyd how to do a light show – “They wanted me to come out on tour but I was too busy, so I gave their roadie lessons” – and even sang on a
Beatles record – “There were about 30 of us in a circle chanting Om over the big piano chord on A Day in the Life, with Paul conducting.” Ferris also filmed some of the famous footage of the Sgt Pepper wrap party. “George [Harrison] handed me a 16mm camera and said, ‘Hey, Karl, want to get some shots?’ It was all about peace and love and groove, those were the three words. Everyone was very sweet… even John Lennon! Rival groups would try to outdo each other creatively. We felt it was a new renaissance, a cultural revolution, and we were going to push it as far as we could.”
Inevitably, it came to an end. “The idea of hippies became a kind of farcical, commercialised thing. You had Coca-Cola and soap powders bringing out advertisements with cheesy flowers.” The Beatles broke up, the Stones headed into exile in France, and “we all kind of dispersed and left it behind. It was an era, and it faded out.”
Ferris’s psychedelic photography is memorialised in an ongoing show at the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, Beautiful People: The Boutique in 1960s Counterculture, and also in his book, The Karl Ferris Experience, which is peppered with tales of sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll. Quite a lot of sex, as it happens, as Ferris took the spirit of “free love” into a less romantic career as a “glamour” photographer for men’s magazines including Playboy and Oui. “I eventually wound up in Los Angeles, where there wasn’t much fashion work, and I didn’t want to stay in the music business. When it came to money, it was always ‘Speak to the manager’. They’d rip off pitches, try and get stuff for nothing, wouldn’t pay for stock. Jimi’s manager was the worst. It became really nasty.”
Many decades later, Ferris was sitting at a London café when Paul McCartney came strolling by. “He stopped, put his head down, and looked at me, and kept looking, then said ‘Karl Ferris, is it?’ I said, ‘My God man, how do you remember? It’s been all these years!’ He said, ‘Those days are imprinted on my mind.’ He sat down and had a coffee, and we talked about peace and love and groove. It was quite a time.”
‘Beautiful People’ continues at the Fashion and Textile Museum, London SE1 ( fashiontextile museum.org) until March 13. To order ‘The Karl Ferris Psychedelic Experience’, go to mixbook.com