SVA Alumnus Frank Ockenfels 3 on Working With David Bowie: A Collaboration Constructed on Threat | Faculty of Visible Arts

If one session captured the stress and thrill of working proper on the fringe of failure, it was the photograph shoot for Bowie’s 1997 album, Earthling—particularly, a second when Bowie requested Ockenfels to {photograph} his eye. 

“This was before digital, and we shot on transparency,” Ockenfels explains. “[With] a macro lens on a Hasselblad, [even] a breath would change focus and [meant] waiting at the lab to see if it had one out of 12 frames in focus.” The uncertainty wasn’t a setback, although; it was the engine. “The Earthling shoot was a lot of trying things, not sure if it would work, and the images were one-of-a-kind. It was amazing.”

That spirit can also be why Collaboration refuses to current the portraits as a sophisticated spotlight reel. Ockenfels pulls readers into the method with contact sheets, sketchbooks, collage-like pages with notes and drawings. The collaboration feels lived-in, not lacquered. “I’ve always liked to see behind the curtain, the choices made and the ones not,” he says.

Bowie shared that curiosity. “David liked my journals and often would look through whatever one I had in my bag while I set up; he liked the manipulation of my writing backwards,” Ockenfels says, referencing certainly one of his methods of together with scribbles and scrawls from his journals into his photographs.