As well as featuring headline slots from Opeth, Architects and Amon Amarth, this weekend’s Bloodstock Open Air will play host to the work of late Kerrang! photographer Ashley Maile.
The exhibition has been curated by fellow K! luminary Paul Harries, whose work will also be on display, and is due to feature Ashley’s iconic shots of Bloodstock alumni, including Ghost, Satyricon and Devin Townsend, as well as rock and metal giants Ozzy Osbourne, Metallica and Slash. Upon learning of Ashley’s death in 2013, the Guns N’ Roses guitarist tweeted, "Rock n’ Roll has lost a great photographer, person, friend, Ashley Maile. RIP man, we’re going to miss u very much."
An exhibition of Ashley’s work, Ashley Maile: Photographer, was organised by his partner Caroline Fish, K!’s former Art Editor, in 2014. “When Ashley was on his deathbed, about an hour before he died, the last thing he asked me to do was to have an exhibition of his work for him, which I did the following year,” explains Caroline. “But I know he would be so thrilled to have his work shown again, especially at a place where people love his photography. Ashley was a music fan as well as a photographer, so it meant a lot to him to represent the bands he loved, which showed in his pictures. Bloodstock being full-on metal meant it was somewhere he felt really at home.”
We caught up with Paul, who relaunched his friend’s online print store last year, to discuss his relationship with Ashley, what made him and his pictures special, and why it’s vital that his work continues to be discovered by new generations of music fans and aspiring snappers alike.
When did you and Ashley first cross paths?
“The first time I met Ashley was in 2006, when he came over from Canada, where he was from, to shoot at Download that year. I’d seen his name a few times in the magazine before then; he was in Vancouver, so it was fairly easy for him to travel into the U.S., so he’d been doing stuff for K! stateside. The night before 2006, we all met up in the hotel nearby and we met in the bar. At that point, we’d both made the switch from film to digital, so we were talking a lot about the advantages and the challenges of that. Working with digital is obviously far more computer-based, so there were a lot of opportunities to sit down with our laptops and look through one another’s pictures, which we always enjoyed doing.”