Paul Harries - case study

To futher my understanding of the types of photography in music magazines, I have looked at photographers who work for NME, Kerrang, MOJO and Q, specifically I looked at Paul Harries work.

Paul Harries is an internationally renowned photographer, he has photographed some of the worlds best known rock musicians. He has worked as a freelance photographer for twenty years, most of the time was spent working for Kerrang. He has taken pictures of musicians and bands such as; Ozzy Ozbourne, Foo Fighters, Slash and Green Day.

This is a medium close-up of the band Foo fighters, the photographer has chosen to use a purple backdrop for the shot, the medium close-up allows for the entire band to be in the shot as there are four members and the image quality is very good and has a lot of detail. The purple backdrop is relative to the style Kerrang uses in their images, as they tend to use bright colours in their images so this picture is actually following the common conventions of Kerrang magazine. This kind of image is likely to be featured on the front cover of the magazine because it features a well-known band and it would be the star vehicle for the magazine and probably relate to the main story.

This is another image of his, it is an image of the lead singer of Muse, this time he has used a black and white background instead of a colourful one, and this could be because the band Muse are again in the rock genre and using black and white imagery is a classic convention of rock photography. This picture would be good for a feature inside the magazine as it isn’t a particularly attracting image, which would catch your eye but instead is a highly detailed, quality shot.