T10. Intense; ChromaLuxe print from the Ziggy Stardust session, 1972. ChromaLuxe printing uses a process called dye sublimation which fuses images on to a 1.2mm panel of white coated aluminium and achieves a high luminosity and a colour intensity comparable to the traditional Cibachrome and Kodachrome prints.

T12. Knife; the original poster, designed by pioneering airbrush artist Philip Castle, for Stanley Kubrick’s film version of the Anthony Burgess novel A Clockwork Orange. Kubrick commissioned and briefed Castle himself. Duffy worked with Castle and the provocative pop artist Allen Jones on the 1973 Pirelli calendar, originally produced in 1964 by the UK subsidiary of the tyre company as a naughty corporate gift for important clients. By the 1970s each annual edition would showcase the leading models, actresses and photographers of the time and symbolise an era’s style.

T23. Studio; portrait by Chris Duffy, 2019, of producer and engineer Ken Scott. Scott started working at the famous Abbey Road studio on Beatles sessions between 1964 and 1967 and John Lennon’s Imagine and George Harrison’s All Things Must Pass. Getting to know Bowie as an engineer on the Tony Visconti-produced The Man Who Sold The World, he mentioned to Bowie over a cup of tea that he was keen to produce. His first job as producer was Hunky Dory, and he then produced the Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane and Pin Ups LPs. His technique, he said, was “to let David be David.”

T24. Glamour; once a star make-up artist at Elizabeth Arden in London, the mysterious Pierre Laroche was the make-up artist on the Aladdin Sane shoot. Two years after Aladdin Sane he designed the make up for each character in the 1975 film version of The Rocky Horror Picture Show. A prime influence on glam imagery, he created the Japanese influenced astral sphere Bowie used on his forehead during the Ziggy tour and styled the Bowie/Twiggy ‘mask’ shoot for Vogue that was ultimately used as the cover of Pin Ups. Laroche once said “David Bowie has the perfect face for make-up.”

T25. Life; Celia Philo was a 25-year-old graphic designer who had first worked with Duffy on the 1973 Pirelli calendar. Liking her work, he asked her to be part of Duffy Design Concepts and she was in the studio on the day of the Aladdin Sane shoot. Watching Duffy develop the photos the day after, seeing the images come to life, she realised “he’d cracked it.”

T70. Sand; ChromaLuxe aluminium print #3 of David Bowie at White Sands, New Mexico, sixty miles from the site of the detonation of the first atom bomb in 1945. In 1975, Duffy had been commissioned by The Sunday Times to take photos of Bowie on the set of the Nicolas Roeg directed environmentally conscious science fiction film The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976). Duffy photographed Bowie as the sun was setting in the White Sands National Monument in south central New Mexico, an alien landscape surrounded by the 3,200 square mile White Sands Missile Range where wave like dune fields cover nearly 230 square miles with dunes often rising over sixty feet. Roeg had used the pristine white sands to represent the barren surfaces of the scorched planet that Bowie’s alien character Thomas Jerome Newton had left behind in his search for a new home. Bowie described the film as a very sad, tender love story that evolves over a long period of time, “the furthest thing from a science fiction film really.”

T72. Risk; ChromaLuxe aluminium print #5 of David Bowie at White Sands, New Mexico. Because the shoot happened late in the day, Duffy riskily shot Bowie in dim light with no autofocus, with a one second triple exposure while Bowie kept his body still and moved his arms so that Duffy could get the blurred action he was looking for. There was no polaroid taken and with limited time only one chance to get the shot. Duffy would not see the processed film until he returned to the UK to see if his gamble had paid off.

T83. Poster; an original classic UK film poster for The Man Who Fell to Earth, designed by the acclaimed English designer Vic Fair (b.1938), who worked regularly on posters for Nicolas Roeg films. He designed numerous posters for many of the Hammer Horror Productions and the cheeky British Confessions films. The typeface Fair created for his The Man Who Fell to Earth poster would later be used for the Iron Maiden logo.

T101. Cascade; Derek Boshier taken in Camden Town, London, 2015, by Chris Duffy, in front of Amy Winehouse graffiti. Bowie became a collector of Boshier’s work and shortly before he died in 2016 sent him an email saying his work “cascades through the decades.”

T105. Distortion; ChromaLuxe aluminium print of a higher resolution Kodachrome version of the cropped Polaroid ‘accident victim’ photograph used for the 1979 Lodger cover. Bowie wanting an image of a falling man, with his face distorted by G-forces like a pilot breaking the sound barrier. Duffy used chemicals to distort the edges of the image, emphasising Bowie’s intended sense of unceremonious disarray, even violence.

T127. Face; the face of the New Romantic movement, Steve Strange, at work #01, with models Yasmin Parvaneh, later Simon Le Bon’s wife, and Terry. The Chris Duffy photograph was used for the 1984 Visage single Love Glove, from their third and final album Beat Boy. Visage were formed around Steve Strange in 1980 as a kind of studio supergroup using leading post-punk musicians including Barry Adamson (bass) and Dave Formula (keyboards) of Magazine, John McGeoch (guitar) of Siouxsie and the Banshees, and Midge Ure (guitar/voice) and Billy Currie (electronics) of Ultravox.

T138. Visual; Steve Strange #26 for the rear cover of the Love Glove single, 1984, by Chris Duffy. The dressed up Blitz kids finding somewhere to go, something to do and someone to be influenced by in the downtown Manhattan Club Kids scene in early 80s New York that produced Madonna; one way the fiercely competitive drive of the New Romantics, bridging the gap between the spectacle of the stage and that of the street, entered the pop culture bloodstream all the way to Lady Gaga, Harry Styles and Janelle Monáe even as they themselves faded from the front line, and the front pages.

T141. Danger; Pierrot/Scary Monsters/Ashes to Ashes contact sheet #1. After Duffy had photographed Bowie as a flawless, poignant Pierrot, Edward Bell, reflecting the tension between the two, had other ideas. Bowie’s make-up was smeared, his clown hat removed, his hair messed up, and he started to smoke a cigarette, a mere echo of a man. He’d used make-up to change his appearance and hide his feelings, and then revealed something of his true sexually ambiguous self, allowing a glimpse of raw transgressive glamour, a hint of malice, and perhaps encouraging some dangerous behaviour.

T146. Shadowplay; the Scary Monsters photograph before it was manipulated by Edward Bell. The visual artist and Chelsea School of Art student Edward Bell became part of the team working on the Pierrot shots after Duffy and Bowie had visited a private view of his first exhibition, called Larger Than Life at the Neal Street Gallery in London. Bowie, ever the synthesist, was always looking for new collaborators who would bring unexpected elements into his performance – musicians in the studio and on stage, screen and page artists, photographers, make-up artists, designers and stylists. Duffy’s feeling that his time as photographer had passed was confirmed when an image he had taken of Bowie was covered over by a collage/painting of Bowie by Edward Bell, leaving only a shadow from the original photograph remaining. Three people were photographing Bowie for the album cover, but it ended up as a painting.

T147. Pristine; Bowie taking a bow as the pristine Pierrot. During the shoot, this perfectly achieved version of the iconic loner, the romantic darling, the socially elusive subversive, always watching and learning, trying to make sense of nonsense, was slowly distressed and stripped of its clothing.

T167. Walk; David Bowie with friend in a meeting about the Scary Monsters album sleeve in 1980. The Scottie dog just walked into the room and quietly sat next to Bowie. You can imagine him saying in this meeting something he once said to his friend the artist Derek Boshier, “You never have control over who makes you famous. I just came up with ideas and people took them for a walk.”

T168. Seen; Duffy taken by his friend, rival and swinging sixties co-conspirator David Bailey, featuring Bailey’s finger. “Duffy and aggravation go together like gin and tonic,” Bailey once said.