ISLAND 1983

Her father named her. But that was her mother’s name as well. Madonna. She’s top of the charts now with her hit songs: Holiday, Burning Up, Everybody, Physical Attraction. Pop tunes with a disco/soul feel and many are sruprised to learn she’s not black but a greeneyed white blond fireplug with a teen London/Bronx look. Actually she’s from the Detroit area, smelly Bay City. When she turned seventeen she moved to New York because her father wouldn’t let her date boys. He wanted her to stay a virgin until marriage. In New York she had a date with a guy, several dates. She danced with professional dance groups such as Alvin Ailey. She started a band and played the underground scene for a year..Max’s, Mudd Club, etc. A demo tape, a record contract with Warner/Sire and now she’s the newest addition to stardom from the New York downtown scene with airplay every ten minutes.

She’s all for fun. She’s into cheese-flavored popcorn. Her music is a refined archeology of all that is positive about American innocence. It’s not stupid stuff. What emerges is a sincere naive voice with a sensual appeal for cloud nine, better simpler days. In crayon it would read: boy, girl, sun, blue sky, clean water, green tree, buildings, fast car, magic love potion. She’s a Catholic school girl and still has the same pent up desire. In her video of Burning Up she crawls lustfully on the grass of a suburban public park singing, "I’m burning up, burning up for your love," while we cut to her young lover speeding toward her on the highway. The episode ends in romantic death rather than sexual encounter, a more fitting conclusion since Madonna’s desirous frenzy could scarcely be fulfilled within the pop visual medium in a simply sexual manner. Death is cleaner too. Madonna is, in some sense, still a virgin. She is charged with innocence. She is uninitiated because she is over-initiated. Her cup runneth over. Who could defuse her? And so she remains potent and unplucked, forever about to be…

Interviewer: Madonna.

Madonna: What?

Interviewer: let’s go deep into your personal life,

Madonna: No way.

Interviewer: Come on. What do you like? Start with fashion. You’re a girl. You always wear all these great clothes on stage.

Madonna: No I don’t.

Interviewer: Everybody has the Madonna look now.

Madonna: I know. Crotchless jeans, (laughter). Most of the clothes I wear look the way they do because they’re so worn out.

Interviewer: Where’s that stage style from?

Madonna: It’s psedo-Puerto Rican punk rock freak out. A Motorcycle baby. It’s a combination of my two oldest fantasies. One was to be Nancy Sinatra; the other was to be a nun.

Interviewer: Do you ever do that song "These boots are made for walkin’"?

Madonna: I used to do it in front of the mirror in my uniform skirt.
Interviewer: You went to Catholic school ?

Madonna: Uh-huh. The Sacred Heart Academy.

Interviewer: What do you want to achieve now?

Madonna: Stardom.
Interviewer: Make lots of records, or make lots of money?

Madonna: I want to make a lot of love. (whistle in the background) I don’t think about money.It just gets there. Up until a year ago I was still broke and living on the street. But I still feel the same way. Money will never be a problem for me. If you worry about it, it’s a problem.

Interviewer: Did you draw when you were a kid?

Madonna: Phallic symbols. You know Catholics. I used to draw people naked all the time in my art class and my nun teachers used to tell me I had to put clothes on them. So I just drew lines around their bodies. See-through clothes.

Interviewer: Had you ever seen a naked body at that time?

Madonna: No. I never saw naked bodies. I never saw my parents naked. Gosh, when I was seventeen I hadn’t seen a penis.

Interviewer: So were you shocked when you saw the first one?

Madonna: Yeah. I thought it was really gross, (laughter). And I’m not saying anymore.

Interviewer: Did you ever fall in love?
Madonna: I’m always fallin in love. But I get in trouble because I think it’s love then I realize it’s not, but the other person is in love and then I have this problem til I think it’s love again and have the courage to get out of the last one.

Interviewer: Your songs are very fantasy. Maybe they help people think they’re in love when they’re not. Is that okay?

Madonna: Yeah. Fantasies are essential. Without fantasies I would have died of starvation.

Interviewer: In New York it’s difficult to be polite sometimes. Do you think being polite is a virtue? Or is it something you don’t have to think about?

Madonna: I think it’s a virtue. I’m sincere to people who are sincere.

Interviewer: What about people like the president of Warner Brothers Records?

Madonna: I’m just charming.

Interviewer: That makes sense. Your new manager is also Michael Jackson’s manager. And you’re planning you first tour with a band?

Madonna: Yeah I’m madly in love with my manager. And you can print that. I’m rehearsing now with singers and dancers, and I’ll have two guitarists, and two synthesizers, the drums and bass will be pre-recorded. We’re doing an American tour, and European track dates. Not til the beginning of the year.

Interviewer: You were talking before about reincarnation. What were your past lives like?

Madonna: I don’t really…I only have images and reelings, no specific chronological events or anything like that. I do feel really transient in a way. I feel like when I meet people I can absorb their character and be them. And I find that no matter what I’m doing I’m always doing the same thing. Basically. What ever it looks like on the outside. And it just makes me feel..I don’t know…I can’t really describe it verbally because no one’s ever asked me this before, no one really cares. Haha! People just want to hear me sing.

Interviewer: How come you do soul music…"soul pop"?

Madonna: Because I have soul. Because you can dance to it. Cause you can, you know. I grew up in an all black neighborhood and I wanted to be a black girl. I really did. There was something about me that was so much freer than the white kids I knew and they didn’t go to the Catholic schools I went to. They went to other schools and they wore short dresses adn they didn’t have to take baths all the time and their knees were always dirty…I liked the fact that they could braid their hair and it would be sticking up…that’s not why I’m braiding my hair right now…First of all, all the black girls in my neighborhood had these dances in their yard where they had these little turntables with 45 records and they’d play all this Motown stuff and they would dance, just dance, all of them dancing together and none of the white kids I knew would ever do that. They were really boring and stiff. And I wanted to be part of the dancing. I didn’t like my friends. I had to be beaten up so many times by these little black girls before they would accept me and finally one day they whipped me with a rubber hose till I was like, lying on the ground crying. And then they just stopped doing it all of a sudden and let me be their friend, part of their group.
© Island

MadonnaTribe had the chance to talk to Curtis Knapp, the award-winning portrait and fashion photographer who has portraied some of the most influential musicians, actors, writers, artists and celebrities of our times, including Laurie Anderson, William Burroughs, Brian Eno, Dennis Hopper, Lou Reed, and REM, and signing the photoshoot for Madonna's first magazine cover ever.
Back in new York City after spending two decades in Japan, Curtis has recently been featured in two exhibitions about Andy Warhol in Washington and New York City, showing the portraits of Warhol he shot in 1983 that are among the last images of the artist in his last Factory.

MadonnaTribe: Hello Mr. Knapp and welcome to MadonnaTribe. Madonna fans are most familiar with your work for the amazing "early years" photo portraits of Madonna. You happen to be the photographer of the first magazine cover Madonna ever had back at the beginning of her road to stardom.
But you started your career as a graphic designer and you went on painting and doing illustrations in the '70s. When did you discover that being a photographer was going to be the job of your life?

Curtis Knapp: There was a transition somewhere in the later '70s. I had been living in Athens GA. My friends, The B52s needed photographs for some gigs. We took some photos as I dabbled in it at the time. Later in NYC, I photographed many Athens bands - Pylon, OH-OK, Love Tractor and REM’s cover for CHRONIC TOWN.


MT: As mentioned earlier, you are the photographer of Madonna's first magazine cover ever, hundreds covers came after that for her. But what does it feel to be the photographer of that first cover, "Island" is a part of music history now.

CK: I do not think just on Madonna. Perhaps someday (I have been told) my archives will be or help in some small way some sort of history on many of the people or subjects in my files.

MT: That number of Island is very rare now and collectors from around the world are always looking for a copy.
For those who have never had the chance to see a copy, what kind of magazine was Island and how did they get in touch with you to do the Madonna photo shoot?

CK: Arnold and the staff planned it. And they where very excited about it. And they did plan it around the time of her First record (remember records?) release. They had parties etc... She lived on the next block. She came over to the ‘Apartment’ to pick from my contact sheets. My Daughter Rei-re just asked when she could use the living room and watch TV. Ah kids.
MT: What do you recall of that young and fresh Madonna on the set? did you feel she would have achieved so much in the music business and become such an iconic figure?

CK: Honestly, she was very focused on her idea of HER. But at that time, that day, we just had fun and worked on taking good pics.

MT: How many photos did you take that day? Just a few were published and there must be many outtakes...

CK: Yes and fans can contact me direct for gallery prints, which I sell on my site. But between moving here and there many negatives had gone by the wayside and lost.
MT: Recently a slightly different pose of that photo appeared on the cover of a special number of Black & White Magazine for an interesting article. It was a great treat for fans and magazine collector who don't own the original Island cover.
Did you personally choose that outtake for that cover?

CK: "Hands" are placed a bit different and the balance is better. I also used on the book Goddess (Italian version). It is my personal choice.

MT: Did you shoot the Madonna session in Black and White? From what we know it
requires a whole different lighting right?

CK: I work mostly in B&W. I did shoot some color.
MT: What do you think is the quality you have that makes your photos unique?
CK: Simple is best. Focus on the face / person. Not the cloths or the background. But that is different thinking when I shoot for advertising or products. Simple was my main thing when I taught at the Smithsonian Institute in DC a few years back.

MT: In your years shooting for magazines such as Interview and Esquire you went on photographing other rock and pop stars and actors. Which was the most easy person to work with and the most difficult?

CK: To answer that, who would I end up offending someone? I usually shoot (for my personal shootings) only two or four rolls of film. If one does not get it in the first rolls, they are looking for that exposure called in Japan "Lucky Hit". That's not photography.

In dealing with sitters, I always would rush over to them and try and befriend them... can I get you tea, have seat etc...
Irving Penn told me, "stop that. Let the assistant or editor do that. Stay aloof and make a space between you and the sitter. It leads to a better connection later on the set". It took a few years for me to see what he meant. It is like, 40 can’t tell 20 what 40 is like till 20 becomes 40?!

Never been set off. One day Jim Carroll (for whom I did a record cover and had photographed three or four times), brought Lou Reed to the studio. I was nervous. And why? I don't know why.

MT: When we have a chance to meet photographers that have worked with Madonna in the early stage of her career we like to ask them how would they photograph her today. So what setting, what ideas would you like to try in a ipotetich new Madonna shoot?

CK: I think one of these day she and I might re-create that image again. It would not be the same with another photographer. But note MY black turtle neck has been on a lot of people before and since.

MT: In 1984 you moved from New York to Japan. Why did you take this decision? There are huge differences among the two cultures...

CK: That is a huge Q. And the answer could fill a book. It was time for my Daughter Rei-re to start First grade in Tokyo.

MT: Working in Japan you also focused on local artist. What's the difference between working with American artists and Japanese ones?

CK: In America / NYC, people just come over to my studio. [I can remember Madonna shoot ending late and all of us walking down the back dark stairway to exit the building]. Where as Japan is a rental studio system and the sitter (talent) shows up with managers, make-up etc... It's just their style and it works there. Here I like it when I can say 75% of my portraits are private for my art.
In Japan they use the word "Talent-to" to discribe an actor or musician etc... Which does not mean they are talented in many cases. And that is not to say many people really do have talent. Such as Ryu Murakami, Yoko-o Tadanori, Toshiro Mifune (the real 7th Samurai). I have many stories about Japan. Some good some bad some funny. My world there was a Japanese one and not very Foreigner connected at all. In a word "I love it there". Toki-doki sami-shi, for Japan

MT: You recently went back living in the USA, did you find the country changed since you left for Japan?

CK: WOW! Of course. I was frozen in time (I feel like). Used to be I could go up town, walk in, go to a friends office. Now days you get searched at the front door, cameras in the elevators, reception desk on that floor you get out on... Everyone is excepting this paranoia. Along with moving so fast in the electronic world... Humanism is completely gone. It's very sad. But people are wonderful and I love photographing them.