While still a student at art school, photographer Matthew Rolston was hand selected by Andy Warhol to shoot for his magazine, Interview. Rolston's inspired portraits of fashion models, movie stars, and musicians from the late ‘70s and throughout the ‘80s brought a fine art aesthetic to magazine photography, earning him a wide variety of clients ranging from Vanity Fair and Vogue.
Rolston went on to shoot more than 100 covers of Rolling Stone. His meticulous attention to detail and clever staging re-envisioned the way editorial photography was created during the heyday of glossy magazines and the budding music video era. While camera technology of the ‘80s was making it easier for the masses to point-and-click, Rolston's style seemed to reflect classical compositions, echoing the image makers from the German expressionist and silent film eras. Many of his works would not have looked out of place in the glamor magazines of the ‘40s and ‘50s. But in the ‘80s, Rolston's throwback style contrasted the mall rats and neon demons populating the pop culture of the post-disco epoch.
Rolston continues to be a prolific photographer and artist today. And in honor of his new solo show at Fahey/Klein Gallery in Los Angeles, for GOOD, he has selected 10 photos from his archives, and shared a few stories from photographing some of the ‘80s biggest stars.
“Referencing Salvador Dalí’s legendary 1931 painting ‘The Persistence of Memory,’ the design painted on the model Anitta’s face was created by renowned makeup artist Francesca Tolot from a concept I developed. Originally photographed for Interview magazine in 1987, this image became part of an exhibition at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology called ‘Fashion and Surrealism,’ a group exhibition which traveled to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1988.”