Jørgen Angel
Jørgen Angel (born in 1951 in Copenhagen, Denmark) has been a photographer in the music industry since the late sixties up til the early eighties. He has provided photos for innumerable magazines, album covers, books in Scandinavia and elsewhere.
Ever since 1966, the Danish photographer has had a passion for photographing rock musicians. Throughout the years he has been able to get close to performing artists who dominated the world’s greatest stages and have since become rock legends. Jørgen Angel was just 17 years old when, using a camera he had borrowed from his mother, he photographed Led Zeppelin’s first-ever concert – played in a school gymnasium in a Copenhagen suburb.
Thanks to that early experience, which got Angel hooked on the rock music scene, we can now enjoy his world-famous photographs of Led Zeppelin, Jimi Hendrix, Deep Purple, and a host of other rock stars. Jorgen Angel’s art has its strength in the warm relation he developed with the objects of his photography. He would follow his work to obscure striptease shows with Alice Cooper, at the private homes of bands like The Who, Roxy Music, Pretty Things and Uriah Heep, or go with Arthur Brown to the countryside to get his much-appreciated photographs.
The Jørgen Angel photo famously dubbed The Whoosh Picture – a shot of Jimmy Page taken at the K.B. Hallen concert venue in Copenhagen in 1970 – became part of the permanent collection at the world’s most celebrated portrait museum, the National Portrait Gallery in London, in May 2012. Also, Jimmy Page selected the same photo as one of five portraits to be included in a limited edition of 50 signed prints he published.