The first volume in a series dedicated to the photographic work of Peter Christopherson, co-founder of
Coil, brings together his portraits of the four very young members of the Sex Pistols at the time the band was formed in 1975.
In 1975, before the Sex Pistols became one of the most notorious bands in British music history, Peter Christopherson photographed the four original members: John Lydon, Steve Jones, Paul Cook and Glen Matlock.
Working from the band's cramped rehearsal rooms and surroundings on Denmark Street, Christopherson created a remarkable series of stark, intimate and highly atmospheric portraits. These were the Sex Pistols before the mythology had fully formed — four young men on the threshold of becoming a band that would change music forever. Christopherson's photographs reveal a different side of the Pistols: unguarded, vulnerable, defiant and unmistakably young. His carefully constructed images capture the personalities behind the emerging legend, at a moment when none of them could yet know what was about to happen. Rejected brings together Peter Christopherson's photographs of the original Sex Pistols in one volume—a rare glimpse of punk history before the world was watching.
Peter "Sleazy" Christopherson (1955-2010), a key figure in industrial and experimental music, was an English musician, music video director, designer, and photographer. He was best known as a member of design agency Hipgnosis and a co-founder of the bands Throbbing Gristle, Psychic TV, and
Coil (along with
John Balance).
