Online Reporter
KINGSTON. —On a chilly morning in 1973, a 14-year-old Dennis Morris made a decision that would change his life forever.
“Bob Marley was coming over to do his first tour of England and I decided I wanted to photograph him, so I bunked off school to go to the club where he was doing the first date in London.”As he walked towards me, I said ‘can I take your picture?’ and he said ‘yeah man, come in’.”
During breaks in the soundcheck, Marley began chatting to the schoolboy about growing up in England, while Morris questioned him about his life in Jamaica.”
And then he told me about the tour and he asked me if I’d like to come along.
So next morning I packed my bag, as if I was doing sports, went to the hotel and we were off.”
The tour ended prematurely as members of the band demanded they go home at the first sight of snow, says Morris, yet those few weeks would start a career that would see him photograph many of the world’s biggest music stars.Many of these—including an iconic image of Marley taken in the band’s van during that tour —feature in a major exhibition of his work which has been on show at The Photographers’ Gallery in Soho.
Born in Jamaica in 1960, then having moved to London’s East End aged five, Morris’s interest in photography began when he was nine and became a choirboy at a local church, which had a “very eccentric” vicar and its own photography club.
“There was a darkroom in the vicarage and I saw one of the older boys printing a photograph and I just knew that was going to be my life, really,” he explains.
Having captured his first photos of Marley in 1973, Morris was there to picture him again when the reggae star returned to London two years later to play a legendary gig at the Lyceum Theatre.
“I took some great shots of him because I’d seen them perform from that first tour, so I knew exactly how he performed and I ended up with a cover for NME, Melody Maker and Time Out magazines.”
Morris would continue to work with Marley, taking photographs of the star up to his death in 1981.
“My ambition was not to be a music photographer, my ambition was to be a war photographer – but I got sidetracked in a great way,” he says. -BBC
