People
Bryan Adams with portraits in Hagen
The rock musician Bryan Adams in the Osthaus Museum Hagen. Photo: Rolf Vennenbernd/dpa
© dpa-infocom GmbH
Canadian rock singer Bryan Adams has also been a photographer for many years. Now there is a show of his portraits in the Osthaus Museum in Hagen.
As a portrait photographer, Canadian rock musician Bryan Adams says it makes no difference whether he has a star or a homeless man in front of his camera.
“In my eyes, people are just people,” said the 62-year-old on Monday in Hagen, where a retrospective of his photographic work is currently on view. It is true that people’s different histories are interesting, but “everyone has a different path in life,” says Adams. “Who can say why someone ends up on stage and someone else on the street,” Adams continues. “We are all human, we are all interesting.”
The singer and songwriter, who has just released a new album (“So Happy It Hurts”), has been photographing show business icons for more than 20 years. For further photo series, he highlighted war-disabled soldiers or the homeless. Under the title “Exposed”, around 180 photographs of him have been on display in Hagen’s Osthaus Museum since the end of February – including large-format black-and-white portraits of stars such as Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Mick Jagger.
In addition to the series of portraits of homeless people, the high-contrast exhibition also includes the close-up pictures from the “Wounded” series. The portraits show young British soldiers who have lost limbs or are marked by burn scars during operations in Afghanistan or Iraq – in a dignified pose, some with defiance and courage in their eyes.
Adams does not want to overemphasize the special topicality that these works are now experiencing as a result of the Russian attack on Ukraine: “There are always wars in the world,” he said on Monday. History repeats itself. “If it’s not Syria, it’s Afghanistan, Iraq, Palestine. We don’t learn from our mistakes, we keep going,” he said.
The show, which has now been expanded in Hagen to include some of the current works that Adams made for this year’s Pirelli calendar, was previously on view in New York and London and will be exhibited in Budapest after Hagen (until April 24). Museum director Tayfun Belgin assured that it was a coincidence that the Osthaus Museum in Hagen, shortly after a presentation of the painting by action actor Sylvester Stallone, once again focused on the artistic work of a celebrity. There is a connection, however, as Adams revealed on Monday: he would love to win Sylvester Stallone for one of his portraits. “That would be great. He’s super handsome,” Adams said.