When I was a kid in the seventies, two of my older cousins often visited me and my sister. We had a guest room we also used to play in a lot, and my cousins had hung up some posters by rock and pop stars on the wall. One poster I distinctly remember showed Mick Jagger, maybe from the shoulders up, with a burning candle on his head and his eyes looking up and a slightly worried expression on his face. I can’t remember if I already knew then that it was him, but it’s possible that the poster still hung there when I was a little bit older and had heard about the Rolling Stones. The picture must have been from the early to mid seventies, when he was in his long(ish) hair phase.
I tried to find that photo several times since we’ve had the internet, but never came up with anything. I just tried it once more, but when doing a Google picture search for “Mick Jagger with a candle on his head”, all I get are some photos with Jagger and a birthday cake from much later.
Does anyone remember that picture or has better research skills than me?
Wow, great, that’s it! I haven’t seen the picture for at least 45 years, and I’m surprised how well I remembered it. How and where did you find it? Is there a context? Thank you very much!
Bravo fits perfectly. It was THE youth and pop magazine in Germany for several decades.
ETA: here’s my translation of the German blurb:
I hope Keith didn’t read “Bravo”, or else he would have been pissed about “the Stones boss and his men”.
I found it using ChatGPT for the first layer of search, and it found the photo right away, but did not give its source. I asked it for the source and it wasn’t helpful, pointing me to vogue.uk or something like that, but then I was like, duh, Google Lens the photo i t gave me. And that led me to a number of websites with it. It took all of about two minutes of finding. This is an example of where trying out an LLM can help lead you to what you’re searching for where Google may struggle, though one of Google’s products was involved in final sourcing.
(ETA: Actually, this seems to be the only result. I thought Google Lens had given me multiple hits, but now I only see this one.)
That one was from a Wordpress site collecting Bravo posters here:
Well, that’s impressive. I have to admit that I’m still reluctant to use AI for searches, but given this success it seems time for me to make myself familiar with it.
ETA: just clicked the link above, you may want to break or spoiler the link because it contains some NSFW pictures of 1970 Bravo pages. Yeah, the 1970s were very liberal in Germany.
Without getting too far off-topic, AI/LLMs are a tool like any other, and it does take practice and experience to know when they might work well and when they might not. It often helps me tracking down primary sources of things that are usually more difficult to Google. This is not a usual use-case for me, as the terms “mick jagger candle head” has strong, easily indexed search terms in it, but it was worth a shot in case it covered some ground Google either didn’t, or buried deep within its search results. But once it found me a photo, I had to ascertain that it was real, hence tracking down the source with Google Lens. It gave me the result too fast to think it was an image it just generated itself (and it usually/always? says “generating image” if it does so), but I also had to check that it wasn’t some fan art or something. It can be an amazingly helpful tool if used properly.
Although I mentioned that I remembered the photo quite well, as a kid I thought that the candle literally stood on Jagger’s head, and I found that a cool stunt. But obviously that was not the case, either the pic was a montage or else, more probably, he sat in front of the candle which was on a chandelier and it just looked as if it was mounted on his head while it really stood behind him. @pulykamell , you’re a photographer, what say you?
My guess is they took a photo of the candle, printed it. Took a photo of Mick, and cut out the background with an Xacto knife (or similar).
Using the Mick head cutout as a guide they cut an opening in the candle photo, and placed the Mick photo in that opening. They left a narrow gap between the photos right below the candle. Then they put a light behind the photos so there was a glow coming thru the gap between head and candle. They took a photo of that set-up, and voila.
Clues: Mick’s hair looks cut-out; you can’t see any wild hairs sticking up. And the glow around the top of Mick’s head is brighter that the candle could possibly cause.
I couldn’t say with any definitiveness. To me, it looks like a single photo with him in front of a candle, but I do allow for the fact that it could be a composite. Fat load of help I am!
I did see Puly’s post. I’m a photographer as well. I am guessing it was a composite. In 1970/ 1971 two prints would be made and carefully cut and glued together using an X-Acto knife.
Seems to me that the very intense hairlight on Mick is there to help transition and hide the point where the candle photo was placed at the top of his head.
I have to say, AI as a whole is unsettling for me, but I mostly do initial searches with it now…it narrows down so much more quickly than whatever algorithm Google uses.
