‘Hallucinating Light’ – A Fantasy Portrait
Yves de Contades, photographer and creative lead at International Life magazine, has photographed fantasy portraits of 40 leading figures from the UK’s advertising and design industry. Harry Pearce is featured along with other subjects including Linda Burrows (Creative Director, Sunday Times), Theo Williams (CD, Habitat), Liz Sivell (CD, RGA Advertising), Suzanne Dean (CD, Random House Publishing), Jamie Bell (CD, CMW), Justin Cooke (owner, Fortune Cookie and Chair, British Interactive Media Association), Steve Vranakis (CD, VCCP), and former Pentagram Partner David Hillman. The results, a mix of the quirky, the clever and the downright bizarre are available to view online here.
A short video of the private view of the fantasy portraits can be seen here. The portraits will be on display at LBi for one month from Thursday, 24 June.
For his portrait, Harry was photographed holding a very special guitar. An explanation after the jump.
Each subject was asked to provide an explanation of their chosen fantasy. Harry writes:
In the autumn of 1978, at a small concert in Hammersmith, I heard a beautiful song – ”Hallucinating Light.” It was the first time music made me cry. The man who wrote and performed the song was Roy Harper, and amazingly the following year we met in the street in Canterbury. I went to his gig that evening, and after the show sat chatting in the dressing room where he proceeded to pick up his guitar and play “When an Old Cricketer Leaves the Crease” for me.
Over the last 30 years he has become one of my dearest friends. I’ve designed many covers for his albums, and we swap ideas on all manner of things. It’s a beautiful creative road we’ve walked together. Every so often, I head over to Clonakilty in Ireland and take up a short residence in Roy’s wonderful home. We sit in his studio late into the night listening to playbacks of new songs and head off into deep discussions with a companion bottle of Jameson’s Irish Gold. Heaven.
When I was about to leave for the airport having spent a long weekend with him, he took me into the studio and pointed to a beautiful handmade acoustic Fylde guitar. It was his guitar, made especially to record a complete album – The Dream Society. He gave me this exquisite piece, and I left for England, speechless. I play it every day, its quality soothes my spirit.
Needless to say it’s the guitar in this picture and Yves has created grain in the image inspired by a beautiful portrait of Roy on the cover of his seminal 1971 record, Stormcock.
If I’d been asked for a fantasy portrait back in 1978, this would have been it. 32 years later it’s a wonderful reality.
As a final twist to this story, in 2007 Harry and Roy worked together to re-release Stormcock. Roy remastered the entire record and Harry turned the original gatefold LP into a 12pp hardbound CD book, keeping faithful to the original cover but expanding and redesigning everything else.
In the introduction to Stormcock, Roy Harper writes:
The 12-inch sleeve is a piece of hand-size art waiting to happen, whereas the CD booklet tends to be usually dedicated purely to palm-size info. We have tried with this new release, to bring those different functionalities closer together. I’m very grateful that my great friend Harry Pearce encouraged me to do this, and indebted to him for his patience in helping me with design issues for decades now. I’m very pleased to be able to present this to the world at this point; I’ve felt for a long time that this record is worth this kind of consideration.
