Pop Culture Documentaries # 3 Mick Rock : SHOT! The Psycho-Spiritual Mantra of Rock

How do you make a documentary where a rock photographer, albeit one of the truly great ones, is the centre of attention? This is the dilemma only partially answered by SHOT!, a film about and largely narrated by Mick Rock the man responsible for almost all of the iconic photographs you'll remember of Syd Barrett, David Bowie, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop and The Stooges in the early seventies.

These, above all others, are the pictures that made Rock's reputation even though he's taken any number of fine ones since. The film is at its best when exploring his personal and working relationship with Bowie and Reed, represented by recorded discussions with them both and their thoughts on fame stardom and artistic endeavour. Rock talks about his Cambridge education and how his fascination with the French Symbolist poets, particularly Rimbaud, prepared him for his adventures in the rock world. After all Bowie, Reed and Pop are similar imaginative figures for the late twentieth century.

Where its grip lessens is when it tackles the problem of what to do when Rock's fabulous images are not filling the screen and it needs to document his own personal narrative. His dive into New York decadence at the end of the seventies, his cocaine addiction, his brushes with death and heart attacks, his fall from grace and his eventual rehabilitation in the noughties when he comes to work with everybody worth working with from Daft Punk, LCD Soundsystem and back again with Iggy Pop. There are only so many shots you need of Rock doing yoga in his hotel room, lying on a hospital stretcher with a respirator over his face or sitting in a chair staring back at you in his omnipresent shades. Ultimately, his photos tells the story best of all. As Rock himself says, 'You can almost smell this stuff. But you can't really describe it...' Tellingly as that is exactly what the film that has preceded this has tried, mostly in vain to do. The film is dedicated fittingly to Bowie and Reed who both passed shortly before its release. Rock's friends, but also his heroes.