PETER M.HURLEY PHOTOGRAPHY

     I heard my first Chess record in the early '60s in my hometown of Atlanta. A friend's record collection at a 6th grade pool party included Bo Diddley's first album, the one with Bo on the cover in a white sports coat and black bow tie with his legs firmly planted in a wide flying V. Just as compelling were the mysterious figures of a maraca player in plaid cut off by the left edge of the photo, and the drummer with his face obscured by the guitar neck. Who were these guys? I was riveted to the phonograph player for the rest of the day by the pulsating echo, the throbbing drumbeat and the image. I never made it into the pool with the rest of my classmates.  

 

    A family move to Chicago in the early '60s positioned me for a firsthand experience with blues music later on. A lifetime of rock n' roll listening had motivated a deeper excavation into the source. I came to discover that many of the post war blues masters I had heard on records, including the great Bo Diddley, were scratching out a living in the Chicago clubs. I would make my way to those clubs, when my age permitted, in the late '60 and early '70s.   

 

    By and by, I'd become an artist (a painter), and a fascination with jazz inspired a love of album cover art, mostly the Blue Note photography of Alfred Lion. The connection between Lion's beautifully contrasted images of jazz musicians in the studio and Italian master Caravaggio's stark and dramatic chiaroscuro had not escaped my artist's eye. 

 

    Now I realize that for most of my career as a visualist I've been trying to recreate that "album cover art". My blues photography for LIVING BLUES MAGAZINE and two books on blues is a fulfillment of that promise. Photographing the soulful expression of a blues man or blues woman in action under a spotlight in a cramped club is akin to emulating the drama of an ecstatic subject in a Caravaggio painting. 

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