ILLUMINATUS! with Ken Campbell

I’m delighted to share with you my images of ILLUMINATUS! shot in Liverpool 44 years ago at The Liverpool school of language music dream and pun. I had in a vague way been commissioned by Ken Campbell to document the show but I was just starting out as a photographer, just at the end of my degree in Graphic design at Liverpool College of Art. We were in a pub with David Rappaport, Jim Broadbent, Chris Langham, Chris Fairbank, Prunella Gee, and others, I was introduced by my girlfriend Bix Warden who was performing also, Ken told me all about the show, which was at the time the world’s longest stage show, and gave me a card which said ‘there is no enemy anywhere’. I went on to be the shows’ photographer. Later I watched from the wings at the Cottersloe and at 5 In the morning left by truck for Saudi Arabia and never saw any of them ever again… Scanning these negatives has been a labour of love and looking at them now I see that what I lacked in technical ability and exposure control and focus, I made up for in composition and drama! It was a very exciting time, if not the happiest but it was a time when anything was possible and a time when I set the foundations for the rest of my life. Sadly most of the show was shot on colour transparency and I remember very well presenting Ken with lots of yellow boxes of slides so nearly all the shots are long gone. Some of the images here were hastily copied from them at the time. Much of the work was badly underexposed and I developed an exposure compensation technique in photoshop using darkening layers to fix this. Images were shot into my D850 tethered to Camera control Pro and into a watched folder where images were imported and inverted in Lightroom. There were about 40 surviving images.