Duncan Raban
Duncan Raban with a phto from Tina from the 'Whatever You Want' video session
Duncan Raban: „I’m a a Brighton-based passionate photographer of people and who they really are. I have been fortunate, i guess, to travel the world for the past 30 years photographing the famous people we see daily in the media such as our royal family, our prime ministers and the superstars that grace our TV and cinema screens. I have had a lot of fun and been lucky to of had my photographs published all over the world.
However, i was never really content... something was missing and today i have found that happiness in photographing the everyday people we all walk past daily. I have a true love of photographing ordinary people and hearing their stories... as they say everyone has a story."
From his flickr account
After years of sneaking into gigs to take photographs of musicians on stage, Duncan was lucky enough to spend some time in private shoots with The Rolling Stones, Lionel Richie, Bobby Womack and Tina Turner. In 1996, he photographed Tina for the 'A day in the life‘ series, used for the Wildest Dreams tourbook and at the video session for the Whatever You Want music video. Live photos were used for the Wildest Dreams Tour Edition booklet.
It was midnight backstage at some pop awards. I'd had a few glasses of wine so was feeling a little gregarious. A gentleman said to me, "Are you Duncan? I am Tina Turners manager, do you have any ideas how we could photograph Tina in a different way?" jokingly said "Would you like some really different pictures that will be published all over the world?"
"Oh yes", he said. "Well let me get Tina out of bed and photograph a day in her life". He laughed and said he didn't think so! Two days later he rang me and said, "Tina likes your idea, what are you doing tomorrow?" The next day I was having breakfast with Tina. We then flew to Paris on her jet and she bought French bread and cheese for our lunch, danced a lot and then performed for her latest video. We had the wildest time with one of the worlds greatest female icons. This set of portraits were taken on a long 400ml telephoto lens to knock out the background and because I was using black and white film in very low light you get this very grainy effect which I think gives these pictures that extra gritty rawness capturing the energy of the fabulous Tina Turner.