THE ARCHIVE
Ross Halfin’s archive is a treasure chest, a cornucopia, a transport of delight for every rock’n’roll fan — not to mention a rogues’ gallery at times too, for where would the story of music be without the naughty bits? As you know, this enormous catalogue of material didn’t happen overnight. Numbers tell a Twitter-length version of the full-length novel Ross has lived and worked: the archive took the best part of four decades to create and assemble until it comprised of countless thousands of images drawn from sessions with hundreds artists and bands, some of them photographed dozens of times down the years as Ross earned their confidence and tracked their lives and their looks from youthful innocence to hard-won experience. Since Ross started way before computers could compress a career into a microchip, the non-digital part of his archiveliterally does need a warehouse to hold it — pictured below
for fun, but he’s not offering a map to this particular treasure trove.
What’s shown on this website is, of course, only a tiny proportion of the archive, but Ross will be adding fresh images here from time to time as he comes across new/old favourites while digging about in his back catalogue. And the fact is that the majority of these photographs have never been seen before — when working on commission, hundreds of frames are shot and then perhaps half a dozen at most are published.
Over time, many more of these previously unreleased images will be showcased. Another thing: like every real trouper, Ross does requests —and so if you have any suggestions about the artists, gigs and sessions you’d like to see please let us know.
So there’s likely to be previously unseen new and different images on view whenever you care to make the occasional return visit.