George Michael, Paula Yates, ‘Nelson Madela 70th Birthday at Wembley Stadium, Backstage’

© Brian Aris
London, U.K. 1988
Accompanied by a Certificate of Authenticity

‘I first met George in 1983 when he came to my studio with Andrew Ridgeley to be photographed as ‘Wham’. In an era when boy bands were destined to be successful, a due seemed very unliklely. Another Simon and Garfunkel? I doubted it. How wrong I was!’ Brian Aris

Brian Aris started shooting in the music industry in the late 1970s after an encounter with Paula Yates. She came to Aris’s studio because she wanted a career in modelling, only for Aris to tell her she ‘wasn’t tall enough’ Yates left the studio declaring: ‘You are wrong and I will be back!.’ Of course she did, this time with her boyfriend at the time, Bob Geldof. The Boomtown Rats frontman and the photographer struck up a friendship, and Aris would go on to photograph Yates for magazines all over the world. ‘She never allowed me to forget that first put-down,’ Aris says. Roisin O'Connor for the Independent

Brian Aris began his photographic career as a photojournalist, working for a London agency. A series of frontline assignments took him around the world covering various humanitarian crises from Northern Ireland and Lebanon to Palestine, Africa and Vietnam. He then decided on a complete change of direction and opened a studio in London where he started photographing fashion and glamour models for newspapers and magazines. Next he turned away from the model world to concentrate on the music industry that was exploding in Britain and gradually broadened his studio work to include pop and rock stars. 

Brian Aris has covered every aspect of the music scene from punk rock, glam’ rock and straight rock ‘n’ roll to the emergence of the boy bands and then the girl power. His photography has been on show at The National Portrait Gallery in London, the prestigious Recontres D’Arles exhibition in France, and at the Royal Circle of Art in Barcelona. His archive represents one of the largest individual collections in the United Kingdom.

National Portrait Gallery
The Times
Harpers Bazaar
Wall Street International Magazine
E.S.
Telegraph
Volta Cafe
King’s Road Rock
It’s Nice That
Culture24
Independent

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