Kirk Hammett has been staring down Ross Halfin’s lens for four decades. In this excerpt from The Collection: Kirk Hammett, the Metallica star and rock photographer tell the story of how their worlds collided and how the dramatic land and seascapes near Kirk’s home in Hawaii became a photographic muse for the new book
It’s an oppressively humid June day in London, several days after Metallica’s triumphant, career-spanning double headline slot at Download Festival 2023. Sat at the dining table in Kirk’s hotel suite, he and Ross Halfin are reminiscing about the early days.
In 1984, Halfin was working with Queensrÿche in Seattle when he took a call from their manager, Peter Mensch, about the latest addition to his stable—a raw young band from the Bay Area called Metallica who had recently recorded their sophomore album. Initially reluctant to check them out because he’d only seen what he refers to as “terrible, clichéd photos,” Halfin eventually relented.
“Peter said, ‘Stop being an asshole. You’re in Seattle, fly in and see my new band.’ So I went and I met Kirk and Lars—I always thought I met them at a house party but Kirk’s right, I met them at the Hyatt at Fisherman’s Wharf. Then I met the other two at their house in El Cerrito. I got on really well with Kirk and the drummer—we were buds, we went out for Japanese food and got falling down drunk, did a shoot… we always had a laugh, we always got on.”
Image: Ross Halfin has documented Metallica’s journey for more than 40 years
“Ross understood us as people,” says Kirk. “He got the personalities in the band. He knew how to press our buttons to make us laugh, make us pissed off, get us to start screaming obscenities at him, or just laugh with him. Back in the early days when we were much more reckless and mischievous, guess who was right there with us, with all the reckless and mischievous behavior?”
Before long, Halfin became Metallica’s photographer of choice and, as the band’s popularity grew, he could see that they had a unique relationship with their fans.
“I became the de facto person they’d pick, to the point where they didn’t like shooting with anyone else,” Halfin says. “I could always get them motivated, I had a rapport with them, and they were fun to shoot.
“Much like Iron Maiden, Metallica’s appeal was that the audience could recognize themselves in them. It was a real meeting; they weren’t elitist or above it all. Even now, they are a different group, really—a different beast—but the power and the force of them cannot be denied. They are very aware of their audience, their fanbase. It’s not taken for granted.”
Image: Hawaii’s otherworldly light features heavily in The Collection: Kirk Hammett
The process of capturing portrait photography for the book was a labor of love for Kirk and Ross, recalling the spontaneity of those early Metallica shoots when the music industry was a much less complex machine.
“It was just me and Kirk, and the pictures came together quite naturally,” Ross reveals. “We had nothing planned! We’d drive around and go, ‘Let’s go here!’ And we’d go there and it would be great. One day we got up and shot at 5:45am. It looked amazing. It doesn’t look real because the sky was stormy, the seas were stormy, and the light looked insane. And I was making him stand on really wet volcanic rock!”
Luckily, no rock stars were harmed in the making of the book, and Hammett thoroughly enjoyed the experience. “It was really spontaneous,” Kirk says. “When it’s Metallica, people have to consider things and think about them, and that’s fine. But we had the freedom to make choices on the spot; decisions on the fly about what we wanted to do. Ross and I are both very instinctual. Me and him always have fun. And we were consistently getting amazing shots. That’s what you want.”
The Collection: Kirk Hammett is out now via Gibson Publishing.
