Stephen Bull is a writer and Senior Lecturer in Photography at the University of Brighton. He is the author of Photography and Photography and Celebrity, and the editor of A Companion to Photography . Stephen will be discussing Brian Duffy’s photographs of David Bowie for the Aladdin Sane record sleeve. One of Duffy’s photographs, with some post-production, appeared on the album’s front cover in 1973. An image from the shoot was used as the central promotional photograph for the V&A’s touring exhibition David Bowie Is… in 2013. The latter photograph is the basis of the painted mural of Bowie in Brixton, which has become a form of shrine following Bowie’s death. Drawing upon theories of celebrity, photography and indexicality, Stephen analyses Duffy’s images of Bowie and their changing meanings over time.
Paul Burgess is a collage-based artist, illustrator and writer, and course leader for the BA Design for Digital Media at the University of Brighton. A life-long Bowie admirer, Paul has been lucky to see the artist play live on many occasions, from 1976 – 2004. Paul combines lecturing and practice-led research, with freelance work for numerous clients. He has worked within music culture, documenting band tours and working on many design projects for a variety of clients, including Creep Show/Wrangler, Jarvis Cocker/Pulp and the Sex Pistols. Burgess has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions in both this country and abroad, and has delivered papers at conferences in Europe, and the UK.
Con Chrisoulis is a Lecturer in Commercial Art and Illustration at Teesside University. A multidisciplinary artist who has enjoyed a long career in indie and mainstream comics, from 2011 to 2014, he published online a daily web comic, Tales of The Smiths, which was subsequently collected and released by Omnibus Press in 2018. He is currently serialising online his weekly webcomic REBEL REBEL, a graphic novel spanning David Bowie’s entire life.
Paula Hearsum’s main focus of research is the representation and mediation of popular musician’s deaths in relation to dominant social discourses and narratives. The legal, professional and ethical rules around writing about death are often broken when discussing popular musicians and Paula’s research uses critical discourse analysis to demonstrate in what ways media institutions and journalists perform the roles of both reflecting and shaping social values. Paula’s practitioner background as a music journalist combines with her academic disciplines in Media Studies, Popular Music Studies and Journalism Studies, in the exploration of intersections between obituary journalism, gender debates and Death studies.
Martin James is Professor of Creative and Cultural Industries at Solent University (Southampton), where he acts as Creative & Digital Industries Post-Graduate Coordinator. He was awarded a National Teaching Fellowship in 2018.
His areas of specialist interest include music journalism and the UK & US music press, music memoir, social media and identity, late twentieth-century alternative music, specifically punk, post punk and electronic music. He has written a number of critically acclaimed artist biographies and books on music histories. He also co-authored Understanding the Music Industries (Sage, 2103) and has contributed articles to publications including Popular Music and Celebrity Studies. Has contributed chapters to Oblique Music (Continuum 2016) and The Clash and Authenticity (Manchester: Manchester University Press, in press), among others. His doctoral thesis entitled ‘Versioning Histories and Genres’ was an investigation of his definitive work on drum & bass and French Touch. Current research projects include chapters on the relationship between Pink Floyd and punk, David Bowie’s fetishisation of Velvet Underground and the importance of political policy making on the emergence of Grime music.
Stephen Mallinder is a founder member of pioneering electronic act Cabaret Voltaire, regarded as one of the key influences on contemporary electronic and popular music culture. Stephen has recorded and toured extensively in Europe, USA, Japan and Australia and continues to record and play, currently as Wrangler, with recent releases under names Creep Show, Hey Rube, Kula, and Cobby & Mallinder. He has collaborated with a host of artists and musicians including Afrika Bambaataa, Marshall Jefferson, Adrian Sherwood, and has worked with the writers John Giorno and William Burroughs. Stephen works at the University of Brighton on the Digital Music & Sound Art programme.
