A Portrait of Bowie

Sat, 07/08/2017 - 1:36pm by howarde

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It’s mid-2017 and I still find myself missing David Bowie. After his death in January of last year, we read a lot about him in my household—a lot. Several books on Bowie were published in 2016 alone, in addition to lengthy tributes in magazines and online. One book escaped my notice until recently—A Portrait of Bowie: A Tribute to Bowie by his Artistic Collaborators & Contemporaries. This collection of interviews, art, and photographs was edited by Brian Hiatt, a senior writer for Rolling Stone. Honestly, my hopes for this book weren’t too high. I figured it would contain some slap-dash Bowie-themed art and a bunch of sentimental sound bites from famous people. But I put myself on the hold list for it anyway.

A Portrait actually surprised me by how good it is. The unexpected strength of the book is that Hiatt shifts the focus away from Bowie’s more famous collaborators like Brian Eno, Robert Fripp, and Tony Visconti—who have already said a lot about working with Bowie. Instead, he interviews people you may not have heard of, but who have been key to Bowie’s sound and success in the studio and on tour: Mike Garson, Carlos Alomar, Earl Slick, and Gail Ann Dorsey, for instance. Hiatt also interviews photographers other artists who have worked with Bowie over the years. There are a few appearances by artists who never worked with Bowie but were influenced by him, and these are fun to read but didn't add much to my knowledge about Bowie.

And, as promised, A Portrait contains a lot of visual art too, most of which was done in collaboration with Bowie himself. For me, most of the art is hit or miss. But I especially enjoyed Hiatt’s choice of photographs, which cover Bowie’s career from the mid-1960s to the 2000s, many of which I had never seen before.

The truism about Bowie is that he was a shape-shifter, that he was constantly re-inventing himself as an artist. But these interviews give us insight into why and how Bowie performed his transformations. A Portrait of Bowie shows us David Bowie as a person, but goes further in revealing his creative process and how he managed his public image.

If you’re a Bowie fan, don’t pass this one up. The artist Derek Boshier, who painted Bowie and worked on his album covers, says, "I always tell people that we think we know what we look like, and we know each other by looking in the mirror and photographs and films, but David knew what he looked like from every angle, from the back of his head even. He knew every part."

A Portrait helps us know Bowie in that way, too.