Ian Dickson

b.1945
Ian Dickson is one of the most notable rock photographers of the 1970s.

Born in 1945, Ian was raised in a Scots shipbuilding town on Glasgow’s western border. In 1963—just as the Beatles found fame—his family moved to Newcastle upon Tyne, in the north-east of England. He took a design course at Newcastle College of Art and Industrial Design before pursuing a career in graphic design. Within a short time, he caught the photography bug and bought a used camera. Soon he was making a living freelancing and landed a job as the in-house photographer for the Tyneside Theatre Company at the University Theatre in Newcastle.  This led to a chance meeting with Bob Brown, the manager of Newcastle’s leading concert venue, in 1972 and launched his lifelong career as a professional music photographer.

Discovering how much fun and money there was to be had in Rock & Roll, Ian went to London, hitching a ride on Roxy Music’s tour bus, in 1973 and got to work.

His photographs have been featured in Rolling Stone, Sounds, New Music Express, Q, and exhibited as part of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s permanent collection. In 1994, a selection of his work was shown at the MTV Awards in Berlin, at the Brit Awards at Alexandra Palace and at the World Music Awards in Monte Carlo and Copenhagen.

Ian now lives with his wife Shoko, son Louis and daughter Koyuki in the English south-coast seaside town of Brighton, where he is taking life at a more leisurely pace. He is concentrating on marketing his back catalogue online and in galleries around the world, an exercise he regards as “phase two” in his rock music photography career.