From Phantasmagoria to Sun Microsystems with Bob Carlos Clarke

“Enigfuckingmatic” he said. “You show me an enigmatic face.” For a brief moment I wasn’t sure if he was being comic or chastising me. I’m still not sure.

It was the mid ‘90s and I’d recently set up Gyro with a couple of mates. We were keen to show that we could mix it with the big boys by using a named photographer. Having been brought up on punk rock I loved the Damned album cover Phantasmagoria and always remembered the ‘cool name’ Bob Carlos Clarke from the credit. I made a couple of calls and within just a few minutes I had Bob’s agent on the line. He told me Bob didn’t ordinarily work for agencies. It transpired, however, that Bob did live very close to my flat on Fulham Palace Road and I could call him if I wished to talk the campaign through with him. And if he liked the idea he might do it.

I had a brief from Sun Microsystems for Spark servers and so came up with the headline ‘Network for a new generation’, figuring that Europe’s IT directors were probably all mid-thirties and with a young family – Time not to do a sexy shot of a rack mounted piece of tin.

On the day of the shoot, one weekend at a school in Fulham, Bob tested my art directorial metal and we got the picture. Following three days in his home darkroom he handed me a box of beautiful silver gelatine hand prints. Surfice to say the campaign was a huge success, but few would realise that they were looking at a picture by Bob when they opened their direct mail. In fact neither did Bob’s agent Ghislain Pascal when I showed him the shots recently.

Some years later I visited Bob at his Battersea studio and he traded me twelve images for my company calendar in exchange for me to print his. The theme for 2000 was Styx and Stones, taken from a personal project he had just completed. I was sad to read of Bob’s untimely passing in 2006. An art director’s nightmare, but a very attractive man.

Bob Carlos Clarke 1950-2006 RIP.