When Frank Ockenfels 3 decided it was finally time to make a photo book of his work, it was not what most of his fans and clients would expect. David Fahey and Nick Fahey of the Fahey/Klein Gallery approached Ockenfels, whose career spans over 30 years, and asked what he would like to show them.
Although Ockenfels may be best known as a celebrity photographer behind shoots for top magazines and the key art for every season of, less than a quarter of the images in the book are of stars. The rest are a mix of nudes, charcoals, multimedia and photo journal collages that he’s been creating his entire career and that his frequent subject David Bowie would ask to look through each time they met.
"When you see David making that gesture with his fingers on the right, the camera that I used is a passport camera [that takes multiple photos at once], and he was like which [lens] is which [photo]? “Which is 1? Which is 2?” And I’d never even thought of that. So he says, “Let’s try to figure it out.” He took stickers and he stuck them on my camera so we’d know which is which.""It’s a combination of drawing and photography and collage.