Phil Franks Family Album:
Ten photographs in black and white.

Spending four years as a lift engineer isn't exactly the best way to become London's leading head photographer so Phil Franks unplugged his soldering iron, bought a camera, met a photographer fom the rock paper Rolling Stone and was in business.

He has been Friend's staff photographer, freelanced for Time Out and IT, and taken photographs of literally hundreds of rock Groups.

Although Franks was kept sufficiently glassy-eyed to render such considerations superfluous, he wasn't actualy paid cash for many of his early jobs, which is just as well as he finds it difficult to take photographs commercialy. "I see the role of a good photographer as being divorced from photography itself and having more to do with the chemistry between one person and another," says Franks. "My pictures are an attempt to record this interaction rather than simply the people. I want my pictures to be an extension of the subjects emotion. I try to disappear when I take a picture... in fact I do, I press the button, the mirror flips up and everything goes blank."

Phil Franks (pages 16-21) was born in Harrow in 1949 and picked up photographic skills through lessons in a youth club and trial and error. He has just returned from the United States after working for Rolling Stone and Clear Creek, an ecology magazine.