Ian Cook has been a professional photographer since the mid 1960s.
He was born in Brighton and his first employment was with the now defunct Brighton and Hove Herald and also the Brighton Argus. One of his early assignments was to photograph The Beatles who were on their first UK tour. They hadn’t found fame at that time and so he went to the stage door of the Brighton Hippodrome where they were rehearsing and asked the stage manager for them to come down to be photographed, which they duly did.
He also persuaded Marianne Faithfull who was taking part in the first Brighton Music Festival to sit on a table drinking a cup of tea with Kenny Lynch and covered Ringo’s honeymoon in Hove 1965 with Maureen Starkey.
From there he decided to freelance in London and he got a scoop in 1967 when the staff at the Chinese Embassy attacked the police with baseball bats and a gun which landed him a staff job at the Daily Sketch. He was then one of the youngest photographers in Fleet Street.
After two years he decided to go back to freelancing and worked for the Observer and Sunday Times. A trip to the USA for The Observer Magazine led him to contacting People Weekly (a successor to Life Magazine ) which resulted in him becoming one of two photographers based in London covering the whole of Europe and Africa.
He has had over 5,000 assignments photographing subjects as varied as Dali and Henry Moore, Rock Hudson and Liza Minelli, Leonard Cohen, Sting and Tina Turner and travelling round Africa with Bob Geldof during the famine of 1984.
Nowadays he divides his time between Greenwich and Suffolk.
The recent pandemic lockdown has given him the time to sort through his vast collection of photographs and put them in some sort of order. From this he has chosen a number to be exhibited at Mycenae House during September & October 2021.
Prints are for sale as a limited edition of 25.