Young and gritty photos from the summer of 1982
Out magazine’s Ladies We Love issue, which featured pop chanteuse Britney Spears on its first cover that came out last week, just keeps delivering the gay goods: The issue’s second and final cover has hit, and it’s another lady they (and we) love from the world of music: Madonna.
But they didn’t put together just another profile of Madge. Instead, they’ve constructed a pretty cool (and never-before-seen!) photo portfolio from one of Madonna’s earliest photo shoots, just before she was about to hit it big.
The gritty photos – hot in and around the apartment building that Madonna lived in in New York City’s East Village – were taken by now-famed photographer Richard Corman, who contributes a short essay about this experience with the diva to the package, in the summer of 1982. A preview of the cover is here, but you can find the entire set of photographs on Out.com. Love the name of the package: I Shot Madonna. Tee hee hee.
Corman recounts how Madonna was already an icon to the kids in the nabe. She was like the Pied Piper of the neighborhood – they loved her, Corman remembers. They followed her, they danced with her, they sang with her. It was something they did on a daily basis, and it was remarkable. We just walked up and they gathered around. She put the boom box onit was her music, though I don’t remember which songand they just started dancing and singing. She was so alive and unpretentious. She was fierce, determined. Nothing was going to stop her.
Can’t you just imagine? I die. Later, Corman recounts how things have changed for both he and Madonna since this innocent little shoot: For me, like her, when I do a shoot now, I’ve got eight people around me – but that day it was just the two of us.
It’s kinda sweet, thinking about Madonna as just a girl with a boom box and a bunch of neighborhood kids on her heels, right?
From an article by Tanner Stransky, EW.com.
Cover picture by Richard Corman, Out magazine.