Bowie - The Photographers
Bowie - The Photographers: Group Exhibition
David Bowie was a musician, an actor, a provocateur and arguably the most extraordinary photographic subject in the history of rock and roll. No artist of his era understood the camera the way he did, or collaborated with photographers so completely, so repeatedly, and to such enduring effect. From the earliest days of Ziggy Stardust through to the meditative portraits of his later years, Bowie did not simply submit to being photographed. He co-created. The resulting images, album covers, tour portraits, studio sessions, constitute one of the great bodies of photographic work of the twentieth century, inseparable from the music and as powerful as anything he recorded.
From May 8th, The In The Pink in Loulé is proud to present BOWIE: THE PHOTOGRAPHERS a unique exhibition bringing together original fine art photography of David Bowie by seven of the world's most celebrated photographers.
No exhibition in Portugal of this scale has previously united so many internationally significant photographers around a single subject of this magnitude.
At the heart of the exhibition is the work of Duffy (Brian Duffy) whose 1973 portrait of Bowie for the “Aladdin Sane” album cover is known the world over as the “Mona Lisa of Pop”. It is, by any measure, the most iconic rock and roll photograph ever taken: the red and blue lightning bolt, the deathly pallor, the closed eyes, the solitary teardrop on the collarbone. In November 2025, the original dye transfer print artwork sold at Bonhams London for £381,400, a world record for album artwork.
The exhibition also features Steve Schapiro, the celebrated American photojournalist, whose 1974 Los Angeles session produced the covers of both “Station to Station” and “Low”. The surrealist studio portraits by Albert Watson, made in New York in 1996, are among the most psychologically penetrating images ever made of Bowie. And Justin de Villeneuve, Twiggy's manager and an accidental photographer, whose single Polaroid in a Paris studio became the cover of “Pin Ups” and one of the most recognisable images in rock history.
The exhibition further showcases the work of two of British photography's most iconic names. Terry O'Neill, who photographed everyone from The Beatles and Frank Sinatra to Audrey Hepburn and the Rolling Stones across six decades, is represented at In The Pink, with two landmark works: his electrifying 1974 photograph of Bowie with a leaping dog, taken during the “Diamond Dogs” sessions, and his celebrated portrait of Bowie alongside Elizabeth Taylor, two of the twentieth century's most mythologised figures captured in a single frame. Rankin, co-founder of Dazed & Confused and one of the most provocative portrait photographers of his generation, brings his characteristically unflinching contemporary vision to Bowie, an artist who was never less than a compelling and equal collaborator in front of any camera.
But no photographer spent more time with David Bowie than Denis O'Regan, who served as his official tour photographer across two world tours and over 200 concerts spanning two decades. O'Regan's relationship with Bowie began on the 1983 “Serious Moonlight” tour, the global phenomenon that accompanied the “Let's Dance” album and took Bowie to the stadiums of Europe, North America, Australia, Japan and throughout Asia. The images O'Regan made across that tour - backstage and front of house, in Tokyo and Bangkok, at the Budokan and on the road - remain the definitive photographic record of Bowie at the height of his commercial power and global reach. As Bowie himself once told him: 'Denis, Rock and Roll is in your blood.'
The exhibition will be opened by two very special guests: Denis O'Regan himself, and Chris Duffy, son of deceased photographer Brian Duffy and the custodian of the Duffy Archive, who has dedicated himself to preserving and championing one of the great legacies in the history of photography. Both will be present in the gallery on the morning of 8th of May, happy to sign books and talk to interested visitors.
BOWIE: THE PHOTOGRAPHERS is a rare and unmissable event for collectors, Bowie devotees, and anyone who believes that a great photograph, like a great song, can stop time.
