Deborah Feingold has shot everyone from Madonna and Prince to Joey Ramone and the Beastie Boys. Here, she talks about the unforgettable images from her new book, Music .
Photograph by Matt McGinley
For more than 30 years, photographer Deborah Feingold has been capturing the spirit of music's biggest names, from Madonna to James Brown to Prince. What started as a hobby, learning to develop prints in darkrooms when she was just 12 years old, quickly turned into a successful career shooting New York's jazz stars, and eventually rap icons and pop divas.
"I've shot everything there is, including food," Feingold told BuzzFeed. "I've had the opportunity to do a lot of different stuff. But if I was going to do a book, this was the book I wanted to do." Feingold's first, Music, a collection of her favorite photographs of musicians, will be released on Sept. 30 via Damiani Books.
The book is Feingold's first photo anthology, and she says she realized her desire to pull it together with the help of one of her younger assistants. "He was like, 'You've got something really special here. You were there at a lot of people's beginnings of their career and a lot of different areas of music.' [I went,] 'You're absolutely right.'"
In anticipation of Music's release, Feingold shared nine photos from the book, as well as eight rarely seen outtakes (including a photo of her taken by Prince) with BuzzFeed.
Madonna in 1982.
Photograph by Deborah Feingold
I only had 12 frames. When I had asked to shoot her, I had called up a couple of publications because it was a smaller world then. [David Keats] was one of the editors at Star Hits magazine and I asked if I could shoot her for it and he said sure. It was just me and a young woman who was assisting me, we shot in my apartment.
There was no makeup artist — she came ready to go. There was no stylist. I have no explanation why I served a bowl of bubblegum and lollipops. She came in and we worked for 20 minutes and she left. It was just two working girls, staying focused, doing it.
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