Jimi Hendrix Gered Mankowitz

Gered Mankowitz is responsible for some of the most iconic images ever taken of music’s greatest performers. He began with the Rolling Stones in the mid-1960s and never looked back. Over the course of a career spanning more than five decades, he has strengthened the cultural impact of the photographic genre he practices.

Mankowitz’s work has been explored in numerous books and exhibitions and is a subject explored in 2020's docuseries Icon: Music Through The Lens, airing on British television channel Sky Arts and streaming online. But a fitting introduction to this firebrand photographer would start with an electric shock, of sorts.

In 1967, he was commissioned to photograph a 24-year-old music prodigy by the name of Jimi Hendrix. Mankowitz, three years his subject’s junior, wasn’t sure what to expect of the guitar sensation from Seattle, who had just settled in the United Kingdom and was already being hailed by his peers as an artistic genius. The pictures that came out of the session, along with those produced during a second shoot with Hendrix that same year, are the most widely known and regarded as the most important portraits of the seminal guitarist. They not only celebrated Hendrix’s revolutionary spirit and ineffable charisma but also helped define an entire era of musical creativity.

The assignments kept rolling in, and soon Mankowitz had established a reputation as a spirited rock ’n’ roll portraitist. Then came the dream job: In 1965, at just 19, he became the official photographer of the Rolling Stones, a position that he held for two and a half years and ushered him into adulthood. Mankowitz maintains that he kept a cool head on the job and a professional attitude. “The Stones and I were great friends, but I always knew my limits. I didn’t feel I had to hang out with the band in order to fit in,” he says, confiding, “To be honest, I had a pretty wild lifestyle without their help!” One of Mankowitz’s most famous images of the Stones became the cover for their 1967 album Between the Buttons.

On 1stDibs, shop an impressively wide selection of Gered Mankowitz's work, which features some of the most significant musical artists of all time.

Find a broad range of fine photography on 1stDibs today.

The first permanent image created by a camera — which materialized during the 1820s — is attributed to Joseph Nicéphore Niépce. The French inventor was on to something for sure. Kodak introduced roll film in the 1880s, allowing photography to become more democratic, although cameras wouldn’t be universally accessible until several decades later. 

Digital photographic techniques, software, smartphone cameras and social-networking platforms such as Instagram have made it even easier in the modern era for budding photographers to capture the world around them as well as disseminate their images far and wide. 

What might leading figures of visual art such as Andy Warhol have done with these tools at their disposal?

Today, when we aren’t looking at the digital photos that inundate us on our phones, we look to the past to celebrate the photographers who have broken rules as well as records — provocative and prolific artists like Horst P. Horst, Lillian Bassman and Helmut Newton, who altered the face of fashion and portrait photography; visionary documentary photographers such as Gordon Parks, whose best-known work was guided by social justice; and pioneers of street photography such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, who shot for revolutionary travel magazines like Holiday with the likes of globetrotting society lensman Slim Aarons.

Find photographers you may not know in Introspective and The Study — where you’ll read about Berenice Abbott, who positioned herself atop skyscrapers for the perfect shot, or “conceptual artist-adventurer” Charles Lindsay, whose work combines scientific rigor with artistic expression, or Massimo Listri, known for his epic interiors of opulent Old World libraries.

Throughout the past two centuries, photographers have used their medium to create expressive work that has resonated for generations. Shop a voluminous collection of this powerful fine photography on 1stDibs. Search by photographer to find the perfect piece for your living room wall, or spend some time with the work organized under various categories, such as landscape photography, nude photography and more.