Love Will Tear Us Apart

By Kevin Cummins
Vision on Publishing, $30


When Joy Division’s Ian Curtis committed suicide in May 1980, he swiftly defined an earnest, black-clad cult that prevails to this day: Scratch any number of modern musicians (Moby, Billy Corgan, Courtney Love) and you tend to find a Joy Division disciple lurking underneath.

Aside from the music they recorded for Unknown Pleasures (1979) and the following year’s posthumously issued Closer, the band’s cultural potency was also founded in Curtis’s iconic charisma — as proved by this collection of uniformly monochrome pictures by veteran British photographer Kevin Cummins, a punk-era contemporary of Joy Division’s who shares their roots in Manchester, the grimy English city whose ambience oozed into all of the band’s music.

Certainly, Cummins’s shots of the group posing awkwardly against Manchester’s endlessly gray expanse — made yet more soulless by a thick layer of snow — serve to confirm that Joy Division’s sound was anchored in their environment.

Cummins’s live pictures, meanwhile, show that Curtis was a compelling poster boy for a doomed kind of alienation: Few musicians have ever looked either so compellingly lost in their performance or as desperately trapped in their own skin as he did.

Best of all, however, are a clutch of photos taken in the band’s shabby rehearsal space, in which there’s a palpable sense of the shadows closing in. Here in particular, Curtis’s premature demise lends Cummins’s pictures a priceless kind of drama.
—John Harris