Warning: This story covers themes of suicide and depression.

I can’t tell you that I know how Bob Carlos Clarke felt when he hit 55, but by all accounts he never planned to age gracefully or to fade away into the sunset. If he wasn’t at the top of the game, he didn’t want to play, and it was at this age he took himself out of the equation – perhaps while he was still ahead.

He had been afflicted with bouts of dramatic depression for a long time, and his life seemed full of his own anxieties, so reaching an ‘old-age’ on top of that probably didn’t help.

It’s twenty years this month since Bob Carlos Clarke (24th June 1950 – 25 March 2006), at the youthful age of 55, walked out of the treatment centre and took his own life.

Having been on suicide watch when he arrived he’d convinced staff that he was now fine and was just popping out. He’d ‘turned a corner’ and was due to go home the next day. ‘He was so clever’ says his wife at the time, Lindsey ‘he could manipulate people and talk himself out of any situation.’

‘I’d not be telling the truth if I didn’t say I always thought that was, for him, a way out of whatever was going on in his head. Many years before he’d said we were going to take pictures of ourselves every week in front of the mirror in the kitchen, and when we looked too old in the pictures we’d just have a suicide pact and do ourselves in.

I was 26 at that stage and thought it was terribly funny, but there’d been other suicides in that family, and Bob was fascinated by people who’d done it. I think it was just in him. Tim, my daughter Scarlett’s husband, asked the other day whether I think in the final moment, when it was already too late, Bob questioned what he was doing.

I do think about that, but I don’t think he did. He was so confused, unhinged, at the time. He didn’t realise the damage it would do to the people he left behind.’

It is still quite hard for me to hear that Bob had this dramatic dark side and suicidal thoughts, but I suppose the clues – devils, graveyards, sexy demons and gothic make-up – were there all along in his work. It should hardly have been a surprise. Bob Carlos Clarke had been our hero in the late 80s when I was at college. We thought his book The Dark Summer was astonishing – we all wanted to be him.

We tried to recreate his look wrapped with black bin bags, dramatic lighting and long, slow processes in acutance film developer. I was lucky enough to interview him for Amateur Photographer (issue 11th December 1999) and found a gentle man quite unlike the ‘Devil’s Advocate’ persona he adopted for the trouble-making column he wrote in the magazine.

I’d hoped to see half-naked women in latex and high heels, but was disappointed to find him printing pictures of rocks and drift wood that he’d found near his beach house. I was a young hack and Bob treated me very well. I liked him a lot, and was thrilled to meet an icon of my teenage years and be shown around his new and fabulous stainless steel darkroom. But, I suppose, I didn’t have to live with him.

Lindsey Carlos Clarke (now Rudd), was Bob’s girlfriend for a long time and eventually became his wife when they were advised that while living unmarried and having a daughter together was cool it left Lindsey in a precarious position. Sitting in the bright upstairs sitting room of her home in London, with Bob’s prints lining the walls, she tells me a good deal of Bob’s issues came about from his childhood.

He was sent to a boarding school that he hated, and was visited by a father so much older than his mother friends assumed it was his grandfather. This possibly gave him a complex about getting older and appearing old. ‘We were very friendly with a lot of the models Bob would shoot,’ explains Lindsey ‘and they would pop into the studio whenever they were in the area.

They’d come to chat and have lunch at the big table we had in the kitchen. After a while though it got to a stage where they’d want to call him ‘Uncle Bob’, and he really didn’t want to be that. He wanted to be Peter Pan, and to be forever young. He had a real thing about capturing someone at a moment in time, saying that they’d get old and fade away, but that he’d have them forever at that age in his photograph.’

‘Of course the models didn’t think of him as old, but he felt he was and was conscious when he was no longer the same age as the girls he was photographing. One time he told me to get rid of the hair and make-up people. We had a great team, who really knew what they were doing, but he said they were all too old – ‘we all look old.’

Our great friend Terrence Donovan had the same problem about his age. One time Terry was in our studio and Bob said to me ‘Terry thinks he’s getting off with that girl, but he’s not. She just wants him to take some pictures of her.’ The camera gave them such power to get people to do what they wanted, but they could mis-understand what it meant.’

‘Bob could be so excited on a Monday about some girl who been in to see him in the morning – ‘oh she’s amazing, she’s this and she’s that’ – but by Friday he’d think she was a nightmare. He could be quite childlike, and I’d end up being the mother and picking up the pieces. It was quite exhausting.

He didn’t have a way of balancing what was important in an emergency. There was no hierarchy of things – what was more urgent that your mother has had an accident or that you can’t find the chocolate? There was a lot of chaos when Bob was around. He was a terrible lair too – a compulsive liar.

I mean he’d lie about things he didn’t need to lie about – he couldn’t just be going to the library, it had to be a greater mystery than that.’

Greener Grass

Despite what appeared to be a very successful career and a portfolio of genre-shifting images it seems Bob was constantly anxious that he wasn’t doing as well as he should have been, that everyone else was having a better life and making more money.

He rarely felt he was living the life he deserved. Celebrity agent, and also Bob’s agent from the late 90s, Ghislain Pascal says Bob was convinced even Ghislain was having a better time. ‘For Bob the grass was always greener on the other side’ he says. ‘Because I was managing all these glamourous girls Bob thought I was leading this crazy life and making shitloads of money.

He’d say ‘How come Ghislain is making so much money and I’m not?’ And I’d have to remind him that he had a massive studio, a massive house in Fulham, a beach house and that I lived in Wandsworth – how is my life better than yours? Once I was taking a client to a film premier. Driving down the Kings Road in a blacked-out Mercedes I saw Bob coming the other way in his van, so I rolled down the window and gave him a wave.

‘He was outraged, and sent a text asking how I had all the money. He couldn’t see that it was just a car hired for the event. In his mind everyone else was doing much better than he was. It was weird.’

‘I wasn’t working with Bob in his heyday in the 80s, and by the end of the 90s he was struggling with his identity, and what he should be doing because he wasn’t getting the big ad campaigns anymore. It wasn’t because he wasn’t talented anymore, but because creative people often want to work with the young, trendy new photographers that are coming up.

‘I didn’t become his agent to get him more commercial work, but to reposition him in the market. He wasn’t happy with the work he’d been doing. He was also doing shoots for Loaded magazine which I didn’t think he should have been doing, but they were paying good money. He didn’t want his name on the work, so he’d been using a pseudonym that was so bad I can’t remember what it was now.

‘I told him that if he didn’t want to put his name to work he shouldn’t be shooting it, but he was quite pigheaded about it because the money was coming in. So instead we set up an agency together where we’d get a girl in, he’d shoot her and the pictures could be syndicated and credited to the agency. That was the early 2000s, and it was a crazy time for men’s magazines.

‘As well as Loaded and FHM there were all the spin-offs like Esquire, GQ and if there wasn’t a naked girl on the cover she was definitely half naked. Then Nuts and Zoo came along. Nuts wanted the pictures of Nell McAndrew for the cover of their first issue. They didn’t know Bob had shot them, as they came to the agency. I think they paid £8000 for the cover shot. You’d be lucky to get £80 today.’

‘Things worked out very well, as magazines and the tabloids had lots of money to throw at people, and we steered into some nice adverting campaigns as well. In the early 2000s hair straighteners were a big thing. Everyone had a set, and Bob was commissioned to shoot the advertising campaign for GHD – it was a proper campaign too, with billboards, magazine ads, the whole works.

‘They were a big company that paid very well, but it was the last major campaign that Bob shot. GHD also had a magazine, and the very last celebrity shoot Bob did was for that – of Dita Von Teese. His last exhibition was Love Dolls Never Die, which showed at Eyestorm and then I toured it in Spain. When it finished he said ‘Well, that was a disaster!’. I said ‘No Bob, that was not a disaster – you cleared £150,000 in sales!’

‘But he just couldn’t get his head around it. He was always chasing something, but didn’t like the fact he was getting older, that the industry was changing and he wasn’t in his heyday. It would be wrong to say that he was at the end of his career. Things were going spectacularly in terms of him as an artist creating a market and having successful exhibitions. It was all going really well until he killed himself. Then we all went into shock.’

Lindsay also said work hadn’t dried up for Bob, but he was never really satisfied with the way things were working out for him. ‘Bob had a problem. He wanted to take the pictures he wanted to take. But if he was working on a commercial job, he’d say, ‘I hope it’s over soon because I’ve got lots of pictures to take’. The moment there wasn’t a job, he’d be like, ‘I can’t do this project because I haven’t got any work’. So you couldn’t win.

‘There was no winning with Bob on any level at all. I’d just say, ‘Alright, okay, whatever’, because there was always work. He was also very good at creating things. You know, he’d suddenly say, let’s do a calendar for somebody and he’d barge into their office and extract money out of them. He was very good at getting what he wanted. He had a way of dealing with things. Very persuasive. He could undermine you quietly without you really realising it. He had a way with people – he could be so rude, but people almost enjoyed it.’

LBG

‘Two years after his death Lindsey, Tamara (Beckworth) and I set up the Little Black Gallery in memory of Bob,’ says Ghislain, ‘and we ran it for ten years, with a permanent Bob exhibition downstairs.

‘Since the rise of the Me Too movement in 2017 the photography market has gone through a weird phase and sexy girls aren’t cool anymore, but Bob has a lot of fans, so his work still ticks over nicely. We don’t flood the market with prints so interest hasn’t peaked and it hasn’t dipped. A couple of years ago we were approached by Yves Saint Laurent and Anthony Vaccarello, who’s the YSL creative director – and a massive fan of Bob’s work. So he curated an exhibition for the Paris store and the stores in Los Angeles.

‘I don’t think you can underestimate Bob’s influence. It’s kind of ironic because everybody who’s a fashion photographer wants to be a fine art photographer and everybody who’s a fine art photographer wants to make money like a fashion photographer. Bob kind of slid between the two worlds because he was not a fashion photographer – he was never commissioned to do a fashion shoot.

‘Bob used to tease Helmut Newton, saying ‘Your pictures date so quickly because you’ve got clothes on the girls. My pictures don’t date because they’re not wearing any clothes’. And it’s kind of true.’

‘Of course Bob wasn’t all about naked girls.’ Ghislain reminds us. ‘His pictures of chef Marco Pierre White for Marco’s White Heat book are still hugely influential. That book was published in 1990 and sold 200,000 copies. They came to me in 2015 to ask if they could do a 25th anniversary publication.

‘I asked them how many they expected to sell. They hoped for 10,000, but in the end it sold 85,000. Bob’s pictures were a big part of the success of that book. No one in the street knew who Marco Pierre White was in those days, but the pictures brought a lot of attention.’

‘Those pictures were amazing’ says Lindsey. ‘I thought they were amazing. I’d said before to Bob that he could do very well taking portraits of men, but he said he didn’t want to take pictures of men. If an agency called to say they were sending a man round he’d say ‘Please don’t. I don’t want to see any men’.

‘Marco was different though. He asked Bob to shoot the pictures for his book, but Bob said he wasn’t a food photographer and that it wasn’t his thing. Eventually though Bob went to the restaurant in Wandsworth to have a look. He took a ring flash and some other bits, and said ‘I’m just going to see what’s going on’.

‘He came back very late smelling terrible from the cooking and said ‘It’s fascinating – it’s like a war zone in that kitchen’. He agreed to do the pictures but had clear vision for how he wanted them to look. Polaroid’s Polapan was available then and Bob loved it – it was very easy to screw-up as it was very fragile, but it looked great and really worked well for this project. The two of them really plunged into the book, but keeping them on track was a nightmare.

‘Neither of them could behave. I remember going to the restaurant one day and Marco had just thrown his interior designer through the window. There were a lot of times I thought we’d never get it over the line. I thought it would just be a few sessions, but some nights nothing would happen that he hadn’t already shot, so it took two years.’

Bob today

The era in which Bob was working in the 1980s is so different from today’s environment it’s hard to imagine how he would have developed or changed to suit the times had he lived in 2026. I ask Lindsey how he would have coped. ‘I was going to say that he wouldn’t have, and that he wouldn’t have liked it, but Bob was very clever and extremely bright. He had an edge on his brain and he would probably have been amazing if he’d put his mind to it.

‘Things are so unsexy now, aren’t they? It’s terrible, puerile. What I don’t understand is everyone is so uptight about everything now, but we have these little pop stars sitting with their legs open being very sexual. And I’m thinking, hang on what’s okay and what isn’t? Why were the 80’s and 90’s so bad, if this is okay? The idea that we ever had to persuade girls to take their clothes off is mad – they couldn’t wait.

‘One time there was a girl in the studio walking around just in these very high shoes and the bike courier rang the bell with some test rolls that were coming back from the lab. Bob said to her ‘Oh, get that would you’. She had nothing on at all, but opened the door to collect the film. She thought it was great fun, and the motorbike guy loved it. When I did Page 3 I worked with such nice photographers. We used to sit drinking coffee most of the time and chat. It wasn’t at all sordid – it was terrific fun.’

As a man so wedded to film and his fabulous darkroom I wonder how Bob would have coped in the digital world of 2026, and whether he’d still be shooting film. ‘

There are some photographers who never stopped shooting film’ says Ghislain ‘but there aren’t many of them. Film is an additional cost. He probably would have embraced digital photography, but it would have taken some time.

‘There was a job for which he was given a digital camera and asked to use it for a shoot. He just gave it to his assistant and said ‘Here, you take the pictures.’ It wasn’t anything important, but he didn’t want to shoot with a digital camera. After he died people asked, ‘Is that why he killed himself, because of digital photography?’ No, it was because he glass was always half empty.’

Perspective

Photography auctioneer and historian Philippe Garner was a friend and advisor to Bob, and Bob trusted him to critique his work and give him some direction.

‘I admired Bob’s commitment to photography and the process of making pictures’ he tells me, ‘and he distinguished himself with his perspective. Bob brought a lot to the visual erotised subject, and was a million miles away from the cheesy pin-up.

‘There was always something disturbing, dark and beyond the conventions of the time in his work, but he was a complex character. Each image he made expresses something about his world, and while some people could be offended by his pictures he took that in his stride – he never set out to offend.

‘He was a man of his time, and in those times people had a more open mind about eroticism – it was in fashion, art and photography – and there was an appetite for the more discerning visual eroticism.

‘Bob rode that wave, but it was much bigger than him. He is often compared to Helmut Newton. They are more marked by their differences than their similarities, but they both enjoyed being provocative and pushing against the edge of what was acceptable.’

‘Today there isn’t a natural forum for what he and Newton were doing then. Culture and media has been diluted. Everyone can take pictures now, and can cheat so easily, so photography has less integrity and there’s less respect for the skill. Magazines, posters and books had a slower cycle and people looked at pictures for longer, now you can scroll hundreds in a minute without taking the time to consider them. Digital photography has been a major turning point, in the last decade in particular.’

‘Self-doubt plagues all creatives, and Bob was consumed by anxieties and worried that he hadn’t given his best. Did he feel he’d done all he’d set out to do, had he run out of ideas, was he burnt out? I don’t know, but it was a sad and tragic end that has its own logic.

‘He sent me a postcard once with ‘Too fast to live, too young to die’ written on it, and seemed to live with the thought ‘I hope I die before I get old.’ It’s a shame – older people get a better sense of perspective and have fewer pressures, and he missed that.

‘His work has staying power because of its singularity, though it has slipped off the radar of a lot of people. Whether everyone likes it or not, the striking quality of Bob’s photographs mean he’s an important part of British photographic history.

‘I do miss him’ says Lindsey ‘because for 20 years I’ve had to make decisions about what we’re doing and pictures. I think, what would he say? And sometimes I say to Ghislain, don’t tell him we’ve done this. We won’t say anything because I still feel he’s there looking, with that beady eye. He could see everything, you know.’

The Last Dolls by Bob Carlos Clarke is available to order from thelittleblackgallery.com

If you are suffering from a mental health crisis, help is available in the UK from The Samaritans by calling 116 123, or sending a text to Shout 85258 (24/7). In the USA, you can contact The 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (simply dial 988).

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Further Reading:

• How Patrick Demarchelier changed fashion photography (NSFW)
• I’ve met the world’s top photographers and all of them share this one trait
• Sexy celebs have never looked better in these provocative new ‘Womanizer’ photos [NSFW]

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