Made in Bowie
30 years ago, a concert and a t-shirt changed a photographer’s life forever
I was 20 years old when David Bowie came to my hometown of São Paulo to play his first concert in Brazil. This is the story of how I gave him a T-shirt, and he helped me to buy my first professional camera (well, sort of…) It was 1990 and I was just taking my first steps into the world of photography with a second-hand Canon SLR camera and developed my own film. With my tickets bought months before, I couldn’t believe I was going to see Bowie live. Just a week before the concert, I came upon a store that had these great T-Shirts with pictures of great pop acts such as Madonna, Michael Jackson, George Michael, Prince, and Bowie on display. The images were ripped right out of a book with classical photos published by Rolling Stone magazine. The Bowie picture, I came to find out later, was a stunning image shot by Herb Ritts and I instantly bought myself a T-Shirt to go to the concert. When I got home, my mom was very impressed with the quality of it, the print, and the fabric. Being such a business-minded person (my parents owned a fashion store in São Paulo at the time), she told me she would help me buy some T-Shirts at wholesale so I could sell them at the concert and double my money to buy the camera I had been bugging my parents to get me. I went to the venue, a soccer stadium, a day before the concert date, with a bag full of around 40 T-shirts. As soon as I displayed them, I was basically mobbed, everyone wanted one. In less than an hour, I sold out that first lot and more than doubled my money. I managed to get more the next day. I arrived at the stadium in the morning, sold T-shirts till the gates opened, at 2 pm, and kept a few for the concert. When Bowie came on stage, it was just electrifying, I was so close to him I couldn’t believe it. I started shooting a couple of rolls of film. At one point, I was the closest to him as I would ever manage to be, and threw a T-Shirt his way. I was amazed when he grabbed it and danced away for the rest of the song before throwing it back at the audience on the opposite side of the stage. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for not being able to recover the T-shirt. Last year on a brief visit to Brazil, going through some of my things, I found the negatives of that concert. I brought them back to New York and had them scanned. To my surprise, not only there were some great forgotten images but I also captured the very moment he caught and opened the shirt, catching himself facing him on the silkscreen printed in the shirt. I realized that, after all, I got the shirt back. I bought my first semi-professional camera with the profit from those concerts. Being a lifelong Bowie fan, these images carry a great deal of meaning to me almost 30 years after I shot them. And I am showing them to the public for the very first time. His influence on my photographic work has been tremendous, and it is great to realize how some very basic and deep elements of who I have become were already pulsating inside of me: my love for music, for fashion, for photography. My love for Bowie. I hope these images can transport you back to 1990, back to the night when Bowie helped me to start my photographic career and also gave me the time of my life. Alex Korolkovas
The exhibition “Made in Bowie” showing these never-before-seen images of legendary performer David Bowie on his first visit to Alex’s hometown of São Paulo, Brazil, was hosted at TribeTokes Showroom and Gallery across the street from The Whitney Museum in the heart of the Meatpacking District on Wednesday, Sep. 23rd Exactly 30 years to the date these images were taken.
See the images here.
https://www.alexkorolkovas.com/Portfolio/Made-in-Bowie/thumbs
Playlist.
https://soundcloud.com/happematt/radio-soulwax-dave?ref=clipboard
