Born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1961, British photographer Dennis Morris came to England in 1965. He began taking photographs at the age of eight and one of his images even appeared in the Daily Mirror when he was eleven. His career as a music photographer really began when he met Bob Marley, who invited him to cover a tour, and his subsequent photos of Bob Marley & The Wailers, taken between 1973 and the reggae idol’s death in 1981, found an audience around the world. These were the photos that led Johnny Rotten, a massive reggae fan, to ask Morris to be the Sex Pistols’ official photographer when they signed with Virgin Records. The same age as the Pistols, who trusted him from the start and gave him total access to their chaotic existence, Morris followed the mischievously iconoclastic band throughout 1977, taking endless pictures with no concern for any kind of ‘public image’ while sticking to his instincts and the chanted watchword ‘I wanna be anarchy, I wanna be anarchy, oh what a name, I wanna be anarchist, Get pissed destroy!’ Among the results were such iconic images as Sid Vicious using his bass as a weapon: an echo of the gunshot of the Doors’ The Unknown Soldier, in which Krieger uses his guitar to shoot Jim Morrison down on stage, and a portent of Vicious’s appearance as a sharpshooter in The Great Rock and Roll Swindle. He covered the making of their videos, the famous boat trip on the Thames, their tours of Sweden and the UK, and their departure for the United States, where the group blew apart in 1978. The pictures appeared in Morris’s book Destroy, in unique testimony to an anti-establishment cultural movement. After the Pistols’ breakup, Morris became art director at Island Records, photographing personalities including Marianne Faithfull, Grace Jones and Tricky. A musician himself, he started his own band, Basement 5, a mix of post-punk, reggae and dub whose acute political consciousness comes through in songs like Riot, Immigration and Hard Work—songs chiming with Growing Up Black, his moving autobiographical book on the UK’s black immigrant community in the 1960s and 1970s.
