© Bryan Adams Portrait
Since the 1990s, singer/songwriter Bryan Adams – aside from his successes in the world of music – has enjoyed an outstanding parallel career as a photographer, winning several awards for his camera work, among them two prestigious Lead Awards. The inspiration for his work has always been people, and he has dedicated a variety of series to the challenging genre of portrait photography.
In the series: Exposed, numerous friends, celebrities, superstars modeled for him. He shows us how he successfully brings out the character and traits of the people he photographs and captures with his camera. His works are honest and dignified portraits that demonstrate a subtle depth.
But Bryan Adams is much more than a photographer of famous personalities from the world of entertainment. A significant example of this is the series Wounded: The Legacy of War. It shows young British soldiers who have returned from deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq with mutilated limbs, prosthetic limbs, burn scars. They look bravely, defiantly, with dignity into his camera. Their lives underwent a radical change as a result of the war deployment, with lifelong consequences.
With the series Homeless Bryan Adams turns his attention to those who live on the fringes of society: his portraits show people without a fixed abode in London who sell the homeless magazine The Big Issue. He compassionately and respectfully raises awareness of their plight while emphasizing the inestimable value of each individual.
Quote by Bryan Adams to the series In Colour: Inspired by the line “seeing things through rose tinted glasses”, I decided to experiment with multi-coloured plexiglass on some of my photos, to give them a different dimension. In these images, the portraits are immersed in bright, even garish, colours emanating from frames of radiant orange, blue or even pink glass. Adams uses this shrill colour very deliberately – it not only changes the way the photos look but creates an entirely new atmosphere.
Born in Kingston, Ontario, in 1959, Canadian Bryan Adams is a singer/songwriter as well as a photographer. His images have been published in British Vogue, L‘uomo Vogue, American Vanity Fair, Harper‘s Bazaar, British GQ, Esquire, Interview Magazine and i-D. Adams has also photographed advertising campaigns for such renowned brands as Hugo Boss, Guess Jeans, Sand, Converse, Montblanc, Omega, John Richmond, Fred Perry, Escada, Windsor, Kaldewei, Jaguar and OPEL. He was one of the co-founders of Zoo Magazine, celebrating the worlds of art and fashion, in 2003. In all he has published five books of his photographic work.
Public exhibitions of his work have taken place all over the world, for example at the Musée national des beaux- arts du Québec (Canada), Somerset House in London (UK), the Centro Cultural de Cascais (Portugal), the NRW-Forum in Düsseldorf (Germany), the Fotografiska in Stockholm (Sweden), and the War Memorial Museum in Seoul (South Korea) – to name just a few.
Anke Degenhard