Us
Peter had come across and liked the work of the highly acclaimed photographer David Scheinmann. Both Peter and David were fans of the painter Francis Bacon, whose work was the inspiration for the distorted and blurred figure.
“Besides film, I love fine art. This artwork I did with photographer David Scheinmann and there was this sense of playing with distortions from movement” Peter Gabriel.
“Peter made his decision to work with me without really having an image in mind, just a willingness to trust in a process that would lead us there. Lengthy discussions and brainstorming led to a desire to make an image with a contemporary art/performance art influence. I knew the album was hewn from Peter’s own experiences in relationships and aptly entitled US. What emerged was the creation of a physical space in the dominant color of red in which Peter in a blue/cyan suit dipped in pure pigment would be trying to embrace or lunge at a kind of ephemeral intangible female form, but none of that was really planned. The naked female figure in the shot (my downstairs neighbour at the time) was Peter’s idea and he wanted to get across the idea of grasping at all that is illusory in relationships. Many frames were shot on varying long time exposures in order to find that sweet moment where everything was blurred just enough by movement save for Peter’s face. That day it was indeed like recording a piece of performance art. The side walls and ceiling were added afterwards in one of the first versions of Photoshop on a desktop Mac. To cut and paste in the elements took several days to render and the whole image took a couple of weeks to complete. The white outline that appears around Peter actually happened in camera as the red and blue combined as a result of Peter’s movement during time exposure” David Scheinmann.
