A Cooper Chronicle

Michael Cooper was one of Keith Richards's closest friends, the designer and photographer for the Rolling Stones' breakthrough psychedelic album, Their Satanic Majesties Request, and (with Peter Blake) for the famous cover of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album, as well as a chronicler of John and Yoko and the '68 Democratic convention (to which he traveled with Genet, Burroughs, and Ginsberg). But he was also a heroin addict, and died, a suicide, at thirty. Now, over fifteen years after his death, Cooper's twenty-six-year-old son, Adam, and ex-studio assistant Perry Richardson have helped assemble more than five hundred shots from an archive of nearly 70,000 images of the Stones, the Beatles, and the rest of the crowd in the scrapbook-style Blinds & Shutters (Genesis Fine Limited Editions of Guildford, England), published in a neat faux-Kodak-print box. "My father was never seen without a camera around his neck,'' says Cooper. "Even at a wild party at four in the morning, he would still be going strong."

CRAIG BROMBERG