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Duran Duran
About This Item. Buy Item Item Gallery Duran Duran Search Site Duran Duran World Loads of great photos in this coffee table book not just of the band but of the places they visited on a world tour. The indexm which gives a comment for each picture lists 232 photos in all. Withdrawn and now very hard to find 234-page softback coffee-table photo reportage book following the band around the world in '88. From the inner pages part of the reasons Virginia Liberatore chose the project: "I confess: when I first asked to go on tour with Duran Duran I said NO. Really. Having just had returned home to New York after a couple of years in Europe I wanted to settle back into my business of portrait and fashion photography. A big rock tour around the world seemed like one big detour at that point. But then I thought to myself, hey! opportunity only knocks once, don't be ridiculous. I would have been crazy not to go. What really convinced me however, was the nature of the project itself. Duran wanted to do an exclusively black and white photo reportage book about all the places they would pass through on tour.They didn't want to typical rock 'n' roll book, but more of a running view of the world as they moved through it. Initially Duran wasn't even going to appear in the book at all. I thought that they were very bold in their idea and I was flattered that they had chosen me to execute it. At first it was hard not to shoot typical rock and roll stuff because for me it was all new and didn't seem typical at all. When we started off the tour in Japan I was thrown for the first time into behind-the-scenes rock culture shock. Everything seemed photoworthy: the hundreds of giggling fans in a hotel lobbies, the walkie-talkie security on every floor of the hotels, the sneaky getaways out from kitchens and back doors. There was so much chaos and pursuit and then suddenly it was all rules and regulation behaviour at the stadium concerts where the Japanese fans had assigned seats and there was little pushing and jumping. They did scream and sing a lot and knew all the words to the songs. While shooting in Japan, the idea of the book began to change and be reshaped. Though the original idea was a good one, it became obvious that Duran Duran was the main part of the story and had to be in it. I continued to shoot the cities and people around us, but Duran was the reason we were in the places we were in to begin with. They gave things a reason and the context. Furthermore, as a photographer interested in people's faces, it was difficult to resist the subject matter. Sometimes things got wild. Like when I accompanied Simon out on a sight seeing trip in Tokyo, hoping to get some shots of him an interesting setting. Suddenly he was recognised and we were instantly surrounded by fans screening for autographs. As the fans closed in, Simon and Eddie, the security man, took off at 100 miles an hour, and there I was, cameras and heavy bag banging against my side, scrambling to keep up in the confusion. We were always making dramatic escapes from these heated scenes in a getaway limo. It became clear that I had to travel light. We moved from northern Europe in the early spring when the weather is gloomy and drizzily. Everyone on tour seemed to be getting run down from the lack of sunshine and would stay in their hotel rooms all day. I began to get a bit depressed and wondered if I made the right decision to go away for so long. But I did have a job to do, so I took myself out of my warm hotel bed and hit the grey streets looking for inspiration. Not always so easy. For some members of the entourage, however, the excitement of being in Scandinavia, famous for big blond women with liberated attitudes, was overwhelming and many tales of action and adventure ensured. But as for shots of that, well, I thought, kind of typical rock 'n' roll stuff. Right? When we got to Edinburgh at bit later in the season the weather got sunnier, as did my disposition. The Durans emerged more often from their hotel rooms and I was able to stalk them more easily for photos. We threaded our way down from northern England and up to Ireland. In Belfast I got a tour of the city by one of the local security guys at the gig. He drove me around and showed me IRA headquarters and buildings with bullet holes. The fans in England were pretty fascinating. They really dressed up for the concerts in striped leggings, pointy buckle shoes, sexy black zip skirts, with lots of big hairdos and makeup. There was something kind of Medieval about it that I liked. There were also lots of Duran Duran clones. Amsterdam was a flashback to the hippy 1960s. There were coffee houses that advertised "Come in and get high", stores that sold all kinds of drug paraphernalia, women in street level windows with nothing on but a G-string beckoning to passersby to come in and sample the wares. There were even Indian print skirts, beads, and beards. One day when I waxed nostalgic over the whole scene I was dubbed the tour hippy. Very embarrassing. I think Italy was one of my favourite places. Italians have a way of turning everything into high drams, like..." (more inside the book) Virginia Liberatore, New York, 1988 CONDITION: Used: good. Book cover has wear I think because of its awkwardly big size. Wear especially at corner of book (see scans below). MARCH 2013:
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