Rocky Schenck (born April 18, 1955) is an American photographer and music video director. Schenck has photographed several album covers and has written and directed numerous music videos and short films. He has shot fashion, editorial and portraits for magazines such as Vogue, Rolling Stone, Time, New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and others. Schenck has collaborated with many personalities in the music and entertainment worlds, including Alice in Chains, Jerry Cantrell, Adele, Ozzy Osbourne, John Prine, Robert Plant, Willie Nelson, B.B. King, Stevie Nicks, Nick Cave, P.J. Harvey, Annie Lennox, Alison Krauss, Ray Bradbury, Ellen DeGeneres, Baz Luhrmann, Kylie Minogue, T-Bone Burnett, Joni Mitchell, The Cramps, Tom Cruise, Johnny Mathis, Linda Ronstadt, Sheryl Crow, Josh Duhamel, Diana Krall, Brian Wilson, Donna Summer, Nicole Kidman, Gary Coleman, k.d. lang, Jerry Lee Lewis, Natalie Cole, Gloria Estefan, Neil Diamond, Laurence Fishburne, Gladys Knight, Frances Bean Cobain, and Rod Stewart.

Biography

Schenck was born in Austin, Texas, and when he was five years old his family moved to an isolated 800-acre ranch in central Texas, near the town of Dripping Springs, where his view of the outside world came from the movies he watched on television. "Movies were the closest things to the dreams I was having", Schenck said. Schenck's ancestors included two noted Texas painters, Hermann Lungkwitz and Richard Petri. At age 12, he began studying oil painting, and at age 13 he started selling his work professionally. In his early teens, Schenck began writing, directing and photographing short experimental films and learning still photography while shooting production stills on the sets of his movies. Schenck majored in art at North Texas State University. Encouraged by a friend, Schenck left college early and moved to Los Angeles to work with film and photography. Artists in different fields began approaching him for their projects, which led him to create a diverse portfolio of fine art, portraiture, film and theater work. A gallery owner in New York discovered Schenck's work and gave him his first photography exhibition, followed by a second exhibition a year later. Since then, Schenck has continued to show in galleries around the world and his work is now included in several prestigious museum and private collections. Director William Friedkin used Schenck's art photographs as sets in his productions of the opera The Makropulos Affair in Florence, Italy and in the Bartok opera Duke Bluebeard's Castle in Los Angeles. A collection of Rocky Schenck's photographs was published by the University of Texas Press in 2003. The Recurring Dream, Schenck's second book of fine art photographs, was published in 2016.

Published works

His published collections include:

Album covers

Selected videos