Jill Furmanovsky

Ahh the gorgeous and very talented Jill Furmanovsky. In the December NME 1978 she wrote “Prejudice and bias are just as rampant in the music press as in other forms of journalism. In fact sometimes when reading a feature where I was present, I don’t recognise having been there at all.”
A professional photographer, her live shots mix interesting angles and perspectives that make us take a second look at something so apparently straightforward as the performer(s) on stage. Large selection of her photographs in ‘Glue – The Ultimate Punk Accessory’
Jill has had an amazing career, and though we only talk about punk here, she has famously photographed Oasis extensively, won awards for her pictures of Charlie Watts and was flown over to cover the Rolling Stones play Cuba.
More than that she wasn’t just a photographer in punk times. At the time she was going out with Miles Copeland, she was an established photographer but she and Miles had an ethos of just mucking into whatever needed doing and were caught up in the excitement of the possibilities of punk. So if you look at some of the Step Forward/ Illegal sleeves they feature photos or cover designs from Jill. They were also bound up with Sniffin’ Glue from the start which eventually also found itself at Dryden Chambers with Miles. So Jill, like Erica Echenberg, took photos for that fanzine and Mark P became A&R for Step Forward taking Sniffin’ Glue photographer Harry Murlovski with him.
In short the influence of Jill Furmanovsky on punk hasn’t been recognised and she was really wonderful to interview. Being a photographer for a living, like being in music, hasn’t been easy for Jill and she nearly gave up, especially during the Eighties when video and highly stylised music stars became the medium of choice.
She also helped found a brilliant collective of famous rock photographers called Rockarchive in the late 1990s, which, in addition to providing an outlet for the photographers to sell their work, aims to boost the profile of rock photography in general.
The following snippets are from an interview I did with her for the Menace book in 2023.
Jill Furmanovsky (Photographer) I started working at the Rainbow in 1972 as their kind of in-house photographer. I was a student at the Central School of Art and Design doing graphics, so it was unpaid. I’d done a two-week course in photography and blagged my way into the job. By the time punk came along in 1976 I had already four years’ experience doing live shots and was starting to work for the music press.
Her Photography training wasn’t as you might know it now as it wasn’t even a recognised art surprisingly.
I was an art student so I was more looking at paintings than photography because at that time it wasn’t considered art; it was a service department to the other courses. So if you were doing sculpture you might need a photo taken. I was looking at photography because I was interested in it for my own research. The people who taught Photography to us were professional photographers so we had a fashion photographer called Ian Hessenberg – teaching us how to do bits in the studio, getting a model and design. Jurgen Shadowberg worked in South Africa during apartheid for a magazine called Drum – the first magazine for blacks – and then visiting lecturers. I became interested in the usual greats like Bresson. My photographic visual training came from quite a variety of visual arts
One of the earliest punk gigs I went to in 1976 was Generation X at my old college and there I met an incompetent photographer at the time who kept getting in my way but was kind of a bumbling friendly guy. This turned out to be Harry Murlowski and he was shooting Generation X for his fanzine called Sniffin’ Glue with a Zenith B camera which of course I looked down on at the time. Mark Perry was there so I became friendly with Harry and invited him to my darkroom in the basement of Miles’s [Copeland – brother of Stewart and The Police’s manager and Faulty Products owner] house who I was living with at the time. Harry knew all about punk. I was helping him process the prints and he was helping me build a darkroom then Sniffin’ Glue broke into one of the empty offices in Dryden Chambers and ran an electricity cable from Miles’s offices to theirs. Then they would hang out there. They would sleep there if they were at the 100 Club or the Roxy Club so Sniffin’ Glue was now a neighbour.


That symbiotic relationship continued with Jill starting to do bits for Sniffin’ Glue and taking some extra pictures if they needed it. Between her and Harry, band and live shots were covered for the singles, and as someone with some design training, she was responsible for a lot of the early sleeve designs that played a key part in establishing punks’ cultural and visual identity, and signposted to the punk buyer that this was something they would like, whether they had heard it before or not.
I was there for photography, but I took on the role because I had graduated with an art school graphic design degree. I was not a very good graphic designer. But that didn’t matter; if you could only play 3 chords you could form a band or if you had access to a photocopier, you could make a fanzine and there was no concept of good or bad design that matched the mood of punk and was the kind of vibration at the time.
I had some basic knowledge, and I knew how to use cow gum and a scalpel. Cow gum was used by graphic designers to paste lettering and pictures on artwork. You can pick it up and move it but it’s no good for sniffing! That’s how we made record covers in those days. Nobody really knew what they were doing. Everyone was just doing it and getting by and enjoying themselves.
It looks like I did some shots of Menace in Miles’s house and then did some in the street. I did do some of them full length facing the camera and then I thought, “Well what looks menacing?” and I thought, “Bovver boots,” and there’s a little bit of a kind of a skinhead-y look to the clothing and that looked a bit menacing. It was done by the light of a parked car outside Mile’s house.
There was Cherry Vanilla, Vermilion, and of course Wayne County, who were these fascinating characters coming over from the States. They were a little bit more way out and in your face. Vermilion was one of the few women who was her own person and a strong one at that. I think I might have suggested the location as the background seemed a very punk thing to do and matched a song on the single.

A regular on the second wave of punk London gig circuit, she’d released one single on Illegal with her band Dick Envy before they imploded. That first single had a photo of her astride her Hells Angel boyfriend’s chopper and an unreleased shot on same said bike, with Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament, with leather jacket and breasts exposed, which was taken by Jill Furmanovsky.
Favorite punk singles and bands?
The Cortinas Fascist Director – I got amazing shots of them I loved them – The Models – I loved them the singer was so pretty a lovely looking. Sham 69.



Just some of the iconic sleeves Jill designed often in conjunction with Harry Murlovski’s photos and hers that helped form part of Punks early visual recording identity.



Menace at the Roxy are some of my favourite punk shots. I just think they are fantastic and I love them. It’s Morgan; he is a really really great performer and one in particular, he’s no more than a foot away and he’s wearing an interesting kind of robe. I don’t know if he made it himself or what, but it was a sort of Vivienne Westwood style off the shoulder bondage-related look and ended in shreds by the end of the gig. Then you have the audience, which is quite sparse, but virtually within a few inches of them so that the band and audience are nearly completely one, to the point where Morgan is actually singing directly to the person in the shot. He was really good and full of energy.

Menace at The Roxy Club by Jill Furmanovsky
To me those pictures sum up punk so well – you have very little stage between audience and group; they are all one, all on the same page and all in it together. One sets the other off and the Roxy was ideal for that because the stage was only a foot high, and the audience was right on top of the performer performing. It wasn’t really a stage, more a platform, very small and compact. There was very little lighting in there as well, so these shots are all taken with flash. In the iconic shots of punk, you’re not actually seeing what you end up with; the flash goes off and it’s like catching animals in the headlights of a car and they’re just frozen. That is also part of the language of punk photography, and why photos taken in CBGB’s look quite similar because they were also shot with flash. Punk was the black and white era.
Because I was involved with Punk and it was so influential on the music press I started to get work doing the kind of work I wanted like feature and portraiture work with all the music papers. Then it was the New Wave and Gary Numan, The Jam, Ian Dury, Elvis Costello and Siouxsie.

Dead Or Alive cover shot 1983
I really enjoyed it until MTV when it started to become too self-conscious. I had to respond by becoming technically better using lighting etc. But at the same time it wasn’t my favourite kind of work using stylists, make-up artists and fashion dilemmas – should I wear this suit or that suit – Fuck knows! The punk bands I’d been used to either wore whatever or had made their own shit and that I could get into.
I used this period to learn how to do studio work and I was immensely grateful as I had a steep learning curve as a photographer but for me that energy of punk had now been replaced by a kind of narcissism that didn’t really chime with me much. So around the mid-eighties, I tried to do other things outside of rock n roll and went to Peru and Bolivia to do photojournalism there.
For me, it’s always been about photography and I love music very very much and working with musicians and their lifestyles. I like immediacy and even in a studio I have the minimum amount of people there and would try and work on my own wherever possible. I still do. There’s an intimacy when you don’t have a crowd.
In the nineties, I worked for Mojo and Q magazines and did portraits and thought rock has really got old; and yet 30 years later bands like the Rolling Stones and Eric Clapton are still going. Charlie just died. I photographed him in 1992 and won an award for the picture. I thought he looked old then, but 30 years later he was playing Havana doing a 2.5 hour set.
When I started working with Oasis in 1994 I thought wow now I’m working with the Beatles. I loved their music; they weren’t looking in the mirror every 5 minutes. They went from stage to dressing room in the same clothes and that was my kind of band. I was invisible because they got used to me being around and I did some of my best work as a photographer with the boys.
It ball came about because I was trying to publish a book about my work way back in 1982 when I started to become disillusioned but I couldn’t find a publisher. It was 13 years till 1993 that I found a publisher and it was my diary from the Beatles with an Instamatic photo of Paul McCartney and his girlfriend. I was looking for an upcoming band to finish the book and Oasis was upcoming and they were a Beatley – and the book was called From The Beatles To Oasis.
They loved it and asked me to take more pictures. Three years later I did a book on them and ended up documenting them right until they split. That meant there was a continuity in my rock photography career. I was privileged to be there and they liked working with me and that took me up to 2009.

It’s extraordinary really. It’s my best body of work and spans into the digital era. Noel says that was the last rock n roll gig where there were no mobile phones; you have this vast audience of 120,00 and no mobiles. A year later we were in the digital era.
Jill Furmanovsky we at Punk77 love and salute you
TalkPunk
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