Remembering Ken Regan: Rock star photojournalist

Dr. Mark Antman and other photography enthusiasts throughout the world remember the works of Ken Regan whose reputation for discretion earned him a backstage pass to the private realms of rock stars and other famous personalities.

                  Image Credit: Centreflow.ca

He was no paparazzo. Instead, Ken Regan was a trusted ally of celebrities who would gladly open up both their public and private lives so the man from Bronx, New York, can capture a “moment” and christen it with immortality.

Regan’s intuitive sense “to know the moment before it happens,” as Keith Richards described it in the preface of All Access: The Rock & Roll Photography of Ken Regan, is what made the photographer famous—and loved by his subjects and followers. This uncanny ability led him to take iconic images of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen, and Jimi Hendrix.

 

                       Image Credit: Morrisonhotelgallery.com

Regan’s demise on Nov. 25th, 2012 was a huge blow to the world of rock star photojournalism. Gone is the man who has a knack for capturing private scenes backstage such as Bob Dylan meeting Bruce Springsteen for the first time at a show in 1975. Gone is the man who made possible some of the finest images ever captured like that of a 1974 photo of Sen. Edward Kennedy and his son, Ted Jr., walking down the hallway together, the youth using a cane just months after the amputation of his cancerous right leg.

Indeed, Regan, through years of photographing rock stars and celebrities, turned one himself: “We trust him,” James Taylor wrote in an afterword to All Access. “We can be ourselves around him. He is one of us.”