Do you want a perfect example of “outside of the box” thinking? How about photographing fashion icon Diana Ross, for her solo debut album, sans the glitz and glamour for which she had become known during her decade-long, record-breaking stint fronting The Supremes?
Fifty years later, the resulting album cover is the stuff of legend. But in early 1970, renowned photographer Harry Langdon took a huge risk when he shot Ross in her own ill-fitting, cut off shorts and a weathered t-shirt, sitting on the floor of his studio.
The now iconic shot that Motown ultimately went with strongly suggested that the apple in Ross’ diminutive hand may have been her day’s only meal.
In hindsight, it was a brilliant move. No other solo debut in music history has announced an artist’s next chapter more effectively than Ross’ eponymous solo debut. Clearly, it was a new day for Diana Ross!
During our EXCLUSIVE conversation, Langdon jokingly said that The Boss looked more like a famine victim than an emerging diva.
“We’re really going back in time,” Langdon, 85 recalled by phone, from his home in Denver. “We must have shot two or three hundred pictures at that shooting, black & white and color, on that particular day. I don’t know how many gowns we had to have gone through shooting her.”
“After I’d seen so much glamour stuff…I had a hunch that we should try to get her into blue jeans or something.”
“It was serendipitous, like an act of God,” Langdon continued. “Diana put on those cut offs, and they weren’t very flattering, they were sort of baggy. She had on a t-shirt, and she’d grabbed an apple out of the refrigerator I had there in the studio. I had just acquired a monstrous canvas background, and I told her to sit down in front of it.”
“We were taking a lot of chances. I was always pushing the envelope when I was doing my shots. As a fashion photographer, you’re always trying to do edgy stuff, to do something that will beat out the competition. So I thought that would be really novel on her.”
In 1989’s New York Times bestselling Call Her Miss Ross, author J. Randy Taraborrelli wrote that Langdon had used a wide-angle lens to capture Ross’ legendary, apple-munching shot that would ultimately grace the cover of the singer’s first solo album.
Langdon shared a different recollection with this writer.
“It wasn’t a wide angle lens,” Langdon said. “I shot that picture with what was a normal lens in the photography business. But the normal lens, when you get close to a person, tends to exaggerate what’s in the foreground, which happened to be her right foot in that picture.”
Langdon also said that, contrary to previously published reports, Ross was not being coached off-camera by Berry Gordy. While Motown’s CEO had attended the session earlier in the day, Gordy was no where around when Langdon encouraged Ross in a very non-traditional way. The approach helped him capture that sense of longing on the singer’s face.
Ross wasn’t posing, and she wasn’t acting. But she was longing…
for song lyrics!
“My assistant was standing behind me, and I thought it would be a treat to turn him on by having Diana Ross sing ‘Baby Love’ to him while we were shooting,” Langdon laughed. “After we’d been shooting for so many hours, I didn’t know how long Diana was going to sit there! I thought she might jump up at any second and say ‘See you later,’ especially since she couldn’t remember the words to ‘Baby Love!’”
“Another little sidelight,” Langdon continued, with the joy of a kid who had just returned to the playground, “she was driving a Rolls Royce, and right behind the studio, the door opened into my parking area, and there Diana was, tossing her own glamorous clothes into her Rolls, and jumping into the car.”
“It was such a contrast: this skinny woman in cut-offs and a t-shirt, hopping into a Rolls Royce!”
Before sending his photos to Gordy at Motown Records, Langdon blew up the now-famous shot, as both he and his assistant thought it was the most striking. Gordy agreed, and the rest is history. Buoyed by expert songwriting and production by Ashford & Simpson, the Diana Ross album became a smash that garnered Ross her first of six #1 pop records as a solo act, “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough,” and another of her many signature songs, “Reach Out & Touch (Somebody’s Hand).” Langdon went on to shoot Ross several other times over the next decade or so.
“They really started pushing us to come up with other ways to shoot Diana,” Langdon recalled of the direction he was receiving from Motown. “We started running out of things to do, so I started resorting to different settings, camera tricks and photographic techniques, like double and triple exposures, and zoom lens shots.”
“Diana was very up for that! She was very pliable because of her being so slender. You could just twist her around in all sorts of knots!”
As Langdon had such a long, productive tenure with Ross, I had to ask whether her reputation for sometimes being difficult to work with is warranted.
“Diana is a consummate artist in the music world, and she was putting her image in my hands,” Langdon shared. “If an artist is smart, he or she will become chums and create a camaraderie with a photographer as soon as they can. It really makes a difference.”
“When you push that button on the camera, if you like the subject in front of the camera, you push it one way. If you don’t like the subject, or if you’re on bad terms or if the artist has a shitty attitude, you push the button at a different time. Diana and I got along just famously. She was really easy to get along with.”
“So time went by, and she came in a few more times, [after she’d left Motown and] did not have Berry Gordy to guide her,” Langdon continued. “She was strictly on her own. Sometimes, when an artist acts as his or her own support team, they sometimes develop a little more of a hardened attitude. They get a little more serious. That has happened with a lot of my clients.”
“Diana could have been considered to have a bit of an attitude, perhaps a little snippiness and all of that. But with someone with the extreme success and beauty that Diana has, I kind of expect a little attitude. If an artist doesn’t have a little edginess to their personality, I wonder whether they are still letting others tell them what to do.”
“But Diana was just delightful. We had a wonderful camaraderie!”
“Diana was such a talent — she still is such a talent,” Langdon concluded. “She just transformed herself. She went from the little skinny girl, you know, the girl next door, all the way up to this beautiful diva woman!”
For more from Harry Langdon, look to his YouTube channel.
Look for the next in my series of Diana Ross’ iconic photo shoots later this month, as we prep for the release of Diana Ross’ new remix album, Supertonic: Mixes, on May 29!
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