Bob Carlos Clarke (1950-2006) |
Written by Peter Marshall |
Fashion Photographe Bob Carlos Clake dies at 56.
Bob Carlos Clarke, born in County Cork, Ireland in 1950, ended his life by running in front of train at a level crossing near Barnes in London around half past eleven last Saturday morning. I'd travelled up to London on the very train only two hours earlier. The police say that "the incident was not being treated as suspicious." It was a sad end to the career of a talented photographer who lived with his second wife and teenage daughter a few miles away in Chelsea, having sold his studio in nearby Battersea last year.
He'd sometimes joked that he had made more from selling property than from photography.
Carlos Clarke came to England as a schoolboy in 1964, attending Wellington College, a well known and expensive "public school" before going on to study art and design at the West Sussex College of Art. There he picked up a camera so he could ask a girl he fancied to pose for him - and a few years later she became his wife, although their marriage did not last.
I talked with him several times on the phone about his last book, 'Shooting Sex', in 2003, hoping to write about him then, but somehow it didn't happen. Earlier books were an illustrated version of 'Delta of Venus' by Anais Nin (1980), Obsession (1981), 'White Heat' (working with chef Marco Pierre White, 1990), 'The Dark Summer' (1995) and his last book, 'Love Dolls Never Die', (2004).
As Ghislain Pascal, who set up the agency Panic Pictures with him, said, "he will be remembered as Britain's answer to Helmut Newton." Newton's work was redolent of the naughty Berlin of the 1930s, that so fixated Helmut Newton, and Carlos Clarke's work often reminds me of the images in the magazines of his and my youth, although with a touch of something darker and continental. He was however a very versatile photographer, as his commercial work illustrates. He thought that his best work was the more documentary work and you can see a little of that in his pictures of people embracing (and more) in the slide show of couples.
Peter Marshall
http://www.zonezero.com/magazine/obituaries/clarke/index.html
|