I did per focus and pre light using a baby doll. I set up a camera in an underwater housing on a tripod. It was his first time in the water and he wasn’t swimming, he was drifting. “It’s hard to shoot a four month old under water,” says Kirk. I immediately fell in love with the concept of a naked baby underwater, with no air, going after a dollar on a fish hook,” he says.Īnd it was pretty much just that – a four month old baby, with no air, underwater. So how did he get involved in such an iconic photoshoot? Not many photographers at the time were shooting underwater commercially, and that was his specialty back then. I graduated from university and have used my psychology (undergraduate) and human resource management (post graduate) degrees to support my career in Human Resource Management, currently within the Pharmaceutical sector.” I’m now 27, living just outside of London in the UK with my beautiful wife and two amazing children (six months and two years old). My brother and I were more excited about the $50 we received for the photo shoot.Īnd what’s he up to today? “I moved back to the UK from Canada with my family when I was 12. I think the photo shoot was in a local park, we wore some crazy clothes and messed around in pirate hats. Here’s an outtake from the shoot, featuring both of the children:Īnd a rather disturbing photo of BNL he shot, just for the hell of it:Īnd what does Marcus remember from the day? He told me in 2012: I shot both of them together and apart, but the band felt the single shot worked well.” I had diner with my aunt who told me her new boss had two ginger-haired kids. “I shot about seven different kids, but none of them worked well. Snapper Neil Prime-Coote told NME that the little boy (Marcus Priest), who came from a British family that had just moved to Toronto, was the son of his aunt’s boss. But it did feel just a little weird when I realised that my image is potentially in the homes of millions of people. It felt, and still feels pretty damn cool. It probably was not until a few years later that I realised how incredibly popular and iconic that album really was.
“It was not until I was in third grade when it kind of hit me that being on that cover was something special,” Helm told me. So where is that smoking baby today? Well, he’s 37 years old, lives in San Francisco and works as an ocean cargo and inland marine insurance writer. But when the band spotted the original photograph of Margo’s friend’s son in her portfolio, they decided that was the picture they wanted to represent ‘1984’. According to Nahas, the original concept centred around an image of four dancing chrome women, but the realities of creating it were more complicated than anticipated, and she declined.
At the time, Nahas’ husband Jay Vigon was a designer and art director who was helping a friend at Warner on the album release.