Thursday, March 06, 2008

Celebrity endorsements -- like high-end designer luggage -- must carry a lot of weight. So much that, as showcased on the entertainment-news site The Bosh, bag-maker Louis Vuitton has invested in the cachet of both Rolling Stoner Keith Richards and household-name photog Annie Leibovitz to push what we can only assume is a line of leather grips suitable for transporting anything from Vercase do-rags to designer smack. The atmospheric photo shows the ever-ebullient Mr. Richards scowling in mid-strum beside his favorite case in a hotel room that the Daily Mail reports was darkened by draping skull-and-bones scarves over the lamps.
A possibly interesting aside. Back in the early 1970s, I spent an afternoon photographing Keith Richards and Ron Wood in the Stone's hotel suite in the Boston Sheraton. (We were ostensibly doing an interview, but mostly I remember Keith playing "Freight Train" for us on the acoustic guitar, a visit from a barefoot midget evangelist in an ice-cream suit, and something about a switchblade . . .) Anyway, they had all the lamps draped with bandanas then as well. Apparently even total gloom hurts Keith's eyes. Or perhaps not. Because of the low light, I had to take pictures by bouncing a high-powered Honeywell strobe off the hotel room's ceiling. After about 25 shots (not sure how many Richards had), I apologized for the flashes, to which the chain-smoking guitar legend replied, "Which flashes?"
Leibovitz seems to have worked with available light.

3/6/2008 12:31:17 PM by Clif Garboden | Comments [0] |  
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