'Remarkably talented': the epic photography of Kenny Rogers
From the fatalistic blues of The Gambler to the mournful lament of Lucille, Kenny Rogers sang songs full of emotion, courage, drama and heartache. Although his cautionary Americana fables didn’t always have a happy ending, the raspy-voiced musician delivered them with more warmth than a shot of bourbon around a campfire, somehow ensuring that you always ended up smiling.
But the celebrated country singer, who has died of natural causes at the age of 81, wasn’t just great at telling stories through song. He also used photography, releasing several books, and receiving an honorary degree from the Professional Photographers of America (PPA). “He’s obviously well-known as an entertainer,” said PPA president Ralph Romaguera when giving Rogers his award in 2014, “but he truly is a remarkably talented photographer, too.”
Covering landscapes and portraits, Rogers’ images shift between giddily capturing the larger-than-life personas of such friends as Ray Charles and Dolly Parton, to documenting the natural beauty of America’s vast countryside. He could make familiar sights look like a fairytale: his glowing night time shot of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington DC, proudly uploaded to his Facebook page in 2017, makes the 16th US president look more like a mystical levitating god than a statue for tourists to mill around.
Armed with a 35mm Brownie Hawkeye,
Rogers enjoyed taking long walks on the look-out for unique trees. The camera also became a way to stave off boredom while touring America and bringing his signature brand of accessibly nostalgic country pop to fan-filled arenas. “I only worked an hour a day,” Rogers said of life on the road in 2014. “That meant I had 23 hours with nothing to do.”
In that interview, with Sports & Entertainment Nashville, he added: “So we’d get up in the morning, get in the car, and drive around whatever city we were in and ask the locals whether there was anything good to shoot. A lot of the time they’d say, ‘No, I’ve lived here 30 year and there’s nothing.’ And then you’d turn round the corner and you’d find Niagara Falls.”
Although he loved taking portraits of his fourth wife, the model Marianne Gordon, Rogers clearly saw photography as much more than just a hobby. At the height of his fame in the 1980s and 90s, he found time for private lessons with acclaimed American photographers, from Yousuf Karsh to John Sexton. “Karsh taught me how to capture the personality of a celebrity by making them feel at ease,” said Rogers. “When you see them totally relaxed, that’s when you shoot. John taught me the importance of really loving what you photograph.”
Working under these giants of photography, Rogers reached another level. His equipment grew more sophisticated, too. He moved from a Linhof Master Technika 4x5-inch to largerformat cameras capable of producing more arresting 8x10 negatives. The
Thumb, one of his most striking shots, captures a digit-like mountaintop in bold black and white. With the moon hovering low in the sky and the stark rock outlines, it resembles a still from a science-fiction movie, lit with dark mystique.
Like many of Rogers’s environmental photographs, it has real depth, accentuating the shadows. It’s as if he was suggesting that America, even at its most beautiful, had something sinister lurking in the darkness. You could say the same about many of his songs, particularly Ruby, Don’t Take Your Love to Town.
His celebrity portraits are particularly vivid. In 1987, Rogers published Your Friends and Mine, full of portraits of superstars from Elizabeth Taylor to Michael Jackson. He also photographed the likes of Willie Nelson and Tammy Wynette for his 2005 photo book This Is My Country. Most of these celebrities looks at ease and relaxed, acutely aware that the person behind the camera was one of them and had no agenda.
That said, Rogers’s shot of Michael Jackson awkwardly clutching his pet chimpanzee Bubbles like a ventriloquist’s dummy feels as if it was intended to be a little more ironic than his usual work. Here, arguably, Rogers captured the unnerving bombast of Jackson’s eccentric celebrity more clearly than just about any other photographer.
One of Rogers’s biggest lessons came from the Canadian portrait photographer George Hurrell, who taught the singer how to create a connection with his subjects that would spill over into the final product.
“He came down to my place in Georgia and spent some time with me,” Rogers told the Associated Press. “George said to me, ‘I am gonna tell you a trick. I call it the stolen moment!’ He said to talk to your subject about the happiest day of their life and also the saddest day of their life. Just as they respond to the question, you take the picture. It means they are not posing, but rather being who they truly are. It’s honestly such a great trick.”
Often, when celebrities announce that they enjoy taking photographs, we brace ourselves for a dire, staged selfie or shot of a lurid pink swimming pool. Rogers was proof that, occasionally, a celebrity could be just as arresting behind the camera as they were in front of it.
Last June, Rogers posted one of his photos to Instagram, something he did regularly in his later years. Taken while on tour, it deals with all the things the country singer seemed to be most
fond of: epic mountaintops, gorgeous if slightly eerie moonlight, and trees that stand like gods. It’s easy to imagine a silver-haired Rogers, probably in a cowboy hat, smiling behind the camera, just taking it all in.