Joel Brodsky

Joel Brodsky, photographer: born New York, 7 October 1939; married (three daughters); died Stamford, Connecticut 1 March 2007.

If he'd only taken the bare-chested, Christ-like shots of Jim Morrison which, after his death in 1971, turned the Doors frontman into one of rock's major icons, Joel Brodsky would deserve a place in the pantheon of great music photographers alongside Gered Mankovitz, Henry Diltz, Mick Rock, Annie Leibovitz and Anton Corbijn.

In fact, not content with photographing Morrison, Brodsky also shot hundreds of striking album covers, not only for the Doors - the street performers on the front of Strange Days eerily fit the music on the group's second album (1968) - but also Joan Baez, Judy Collins, Harry Chapin, Van Morrison, the Stooges, the MC5, Booker T & the MG's, Isaac Hayes, James Brown, Aretha Franklin, Funkadelic, the Ohio Players, the Salsoul Orchestra, Barbara Mason, Kiss and Tom Waits.

Born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1939, Brodsky developed an interest in photography in his teenage years. Having graduated from Syracuse University and served in the US Army, he set up his own studio in New York in 1966. As a favour to one of his wife's friends, he shot the cover for 'Bout Changes and Things, the second album the folk singer Eric Andersen issued on Vanguard, and subsequently photographed many of the artists signed to the label such as Country Joe & the Fish, Otis Spann, Junior Wells and Buddy Guy.

Young and full of ideas, Brodsky proved a natural fit with the Doors when the Los Angeles group came to the Big Apple at the end of 1966 after signing to Jac Holzman's Elektra Records. Over the course of several sessions, Brodsky shot the picture of the keyboard-player Ray Manzarek, Morrison (the singer is the only one in profile), the guitarist Robbie Krieger and the drummer John Densmore which appeared on the back of their 1967 eponymous début album and their first advertising billboard. The group's labels would go back to his striking photographs again and again over the next 40 years, most notably for the front cover of their fourth album, The Soft Parade (1969), but also for such posthumous releases as An American Prayer (1978) and the many compilations and box-sets which have since fuelled the legend.

Brodsky relished telling the story of how he got the famous, smouldering pictures of Morrison in his "Young Lion" prime: "The session started out normally. We were taking group shots and they were all being very co-operative. The Doors were among the brighter groups I'd shot at that point. They had a visual orientation and seemed to understand the potential of a good photo session. Initially, there seemed to be a little jealousy that Morrison was being put so up front in the photos, but basically the others understood that Jim was the sex symbol and an important visual focus for the band."

After the group shots, he took some individual pictures - "saving Morrison for last. I knew I was going to be spending the most time with him, so I didn't want them to have to sit around and wait too long. Well, while this was going on, Jim was drinking quite a bit. So, by the time I got to shooting the individual shots of him, Morrison was pretty loose.

"The shot on the inner sleeve of the Greatest Hits album was pretty near the end, I think. By that time, he was so drunk he was stumbling into the lights and we had to stop the session. He wasn't a wild drunk - actually he was kind of quiet - but his equilibrium wasn't too terrific. Still, he was great to photograph because he had a very interesting look."

A week or so later, one of the shots appeared in The Village Voice: "The story I've heard is that they got something like 10,000 requests for the picture. You know, Morrison never really looked that way again . . . I think I got him at his peak."

The photo-shoot was recreated in The Doors, Oliver Stone's 1991 biopic starring Val Kilmer, though the director couldn't resist taking liberties with the truth and spiced up the scene by making the photographer character female.

Far from resting on his laurels, Brodsky kept busy into the Seventies. His eye-catching sleeves include the MC5's Kick Out the Jams, juxtaposing several exposures to match the excitement of the live recording; McLemore Avenue by Booker T & the MG's, with the four members crossing the street outside Stax studios à la Abbey Road for this instrumental version of the Beatles' album; and Black Moses by Isaac Hayes, which unfolded into a 4ft-by-3ft cross-shaped poster and became the biggest album cover ever printed.

Brodsky later moved into advertising, directing commercials for Avon, Revlon and Bloomingdale's. With the increased interest in rock lore and memorabilia, he was happy to exhibit and talk about his work, and especially enjoyed describing the sexy, statuesque, shaven-headed African-American model who adorned the alluring gatefold sleeves he shot for the Ohio Players: "I never met them but I did seven albums for them. Pain, Pleasure, Ecstasy, Climax and I don't remember. When you've got something that works, just stay with it."

Pierre Perrone