numerous musicians—that included being backstage for the Beatles’ final concert in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. More than anything, Marshall was known for being the chief photographer for the iconic 1969 rock music festival Woodstock. He had already published books of collections of his backstage photos of musicians.
Lulow’s visit with Marshall proved to be a turning point in his career. Marshall had just shot Janis Joplin for a magazine cover. When Lulow saw Jim Marshall’s studio, that’s when he got the idea to do studio pictures and more album covers.
Bill Lulow was becoming increasingly known in the music world, not only as a photographer but as a great resource for locating hard-to-get photos. At one point he got a call from a San Francisco photographer who had a shot of Jim Marshall. In exchange, Lulow sent him a rare photo he had of Mike Bloomfield from the Paul Butterfield blues band. Although Lulow had already started to photograph rock bands in Denver, he didn’t yet have a studio or a lot of lighting equipment. While he had photographed most people outdoors, he was becoming more interested in doing studio work.
Shooting concerts was difficult because it required access to the performers and using a long telephoto lens. Lulow wanted to get to know the musicians the same way Annie Leibovitz did later in her life by traveling backstage with the Rolling Stones. Typically, a photographer can’t get into any of these venues unless they are doing an assignment with a specific media outlet. With Lulow his lucky break came as a result of his close working relationship with a writer named Jackie Campbell.
Prolific writer Jackie Campbell began her career with the Providence Journal in Rhode Island. When she and her husband moved the family to Denver, she began looking to connect with photographers as collaborators for story assignments—that’s how she found Bill Lulow. She had heard that Lulow had just moved to Denver from New York City and was looking for a different sort of lifestyle. While Lulow had always been interested in photography, now it became an obsession. He began studying and doing everything he could to ramp up in this highly competitive business.
As a team, they initially connected with a Features Editor at the Denver Post, who was interested in Jackie Campbell’s writing and in Bill Lulow’s photographs. The Editor told them that Judy Collins, a former Denver resident, was going to be in town for a concert and asked them to interview her and do some photographs at her home. Lulow and Campbell jumped at the chance and soon were on their way to conducting many such interviews, mostly around the music scene in the Denver-Boulder area.
Rod Stewart Jackie Campbell